


What hast thou found in the spring to follow

by lotesse



Series: Wherein was bound a child [2]
Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Arthurian, Drunk Sex, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, Fix-It, Hate Crimes, Letters, Loyalty, M/M, Post-Canon, Reunions, Semi-Public Sex, Sharing a Bed, Social Issues, Switching, Wild Hunt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-10-08 04:59:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 48,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17380052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: Whatever affair he was caught up in with Will Stanton, strange young man both stranger and intimate, possessor of secrets Bran had not known he’d ever had, it was not ended. Something of himself he had left in England; something of himself he had brought back. The name “Pendragon”: the very sea, frozen and still, seemed to be saying it over to him. Bran was listening, now. He was awake.





	1. Chapter 1

Two days before Christmas, Bran Davies came back from a strange and momentous time in the valley of the Thames, back by the train into the Welsh mountains and through to the quiet shore of the dark cold sea. He left behind him a strange wizard in an attic bedroom, and left something of himself there, too, waiting like a seed to unfurl with time.

It was not ended, whatever affair he was caught up in with Will Stanton. Something of himself he had left in England; and something of himself he had brought back, too. A new name, and the renewed memory of his lost mother. He knew, coming home to Owen Davies in Wales, what he had not known when he had left, just weeks before: that he was Davies’ son by affection, but not by blood. That his was a lineage terrible and apart. The name “Pendragon”: the very sea, frozen and still, seemed to be saying it over to him.

He was listening, now. He was awake. When he deboarded the train at Aberdyfi, he could barely believe how alive the world seemed to him, even in the dark dragging week between the Solstice and Twelfth Night when the cold and dark were ascendant. He'd cut the time close. Once Max and the kids had left him at the station in Princes Riseborough that morning he'd collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, worn out, done with doing. But the walk through Birmingham at midday had woken him a little, and on the way through Wales he sat upright, looking out through the gathering dark at the land of his home.

He got off at the Tywyn platform, and there Owen was there waiting for him, his figure brown and slight, fading back into the landscape as had always been his way, wrapped up in a massive shaggy greatcoat against the December chill. Affection for his father hit Bran suddenly like a plank to the ribs, this small neat ordinary man who'd raised a bastard child out of legend as though it were his own boy, with all the fussiness and silent affection that were natural to his character.

His father's face lit up with a smile when he saw Bran, but he did not reach out to touch him save for a brief grasp of his elbow in greeting.

“There you are, _bachgen,_ ” Owen said to him. “Come, the car's just here. Do you need to stop before we leave?”

“No,” Bran told him, “let's get on home.” Away to the left of them he could hear the muted thunder of the ocean through the dark, and the air was sharp with salt.

Owen didn't speak again as they wound up the winding valley road, and although Bran had meant to stay awake for the drive he found himself nodding off again, his eyes drifting closed and then fluttering back open, only to grow heavy once more – and then Owen had been there bending over him with a face full of gentle warmth, saying soft and low, “Bran, Bran now, come, wake up, we're here,” and the car had been parked, the world grown ineffably silent without the roar of its engine to fill the space.

An arm slung around his father's shoulders, he'd staggered into their little cottage, where the lights had been left on to welcome them. It was Christmas Eve Eve, an old joke of theirs. With a mumble and a wave of his hand Bran excused himself from further waking, making his way straightaway down the hall into his own room, where he'd collapsed into a deep and needed sleep. His father had stopped in to pull of Bran's boots, which he'd neglected himself to remove, before heading to his own rest; and then Bran had been left alone to his dreamless sleep.

The next morning he slept late, only waking when his father's diffident hand came knocking at the door; cracking it open, Owen said that John was there, and wanted to know if Bran felt up to playing their carol at the early Christmas service.

Owen asked, “Do you want to come and say good afternoon, or will you sleep more?”

“No,” Bran croaked out groggily. “I'll get up. And of course I will play with John. The hour should be no problem at all for me this year, with the mess my clock's got into the last few days.”

“That's good,” Owen said. “I am – glad to have you back here for the service, Bran _bach_ , very glad.”

Bran roused himself, and splashed cool water on his face, and attempted to bring himself back to the level of the living. He found that he was ravenous.

“So you found the Stanton boy,” John said, looking up at him from the kitchen table when he came out.

He was not sure, had not been, even in the moment of wakening in his own bed, how much of the present matter was he willing to confess to the other people in his life. His father was a conservative man, his heart rooted deep in the Welsh mountains and valleys. How much of what was in his own heart did Bran want to share with him? And yet, how could he justify holding himself back from full confidence, having just seen the damage wrought by family secrets closely held amongst the Stantons?

He had to tell them something, they wanted a story and some news, and would be at him till they had it. So he told them that the journey had been fun, but not too eventful; that he’d been able to do the Stantons some service; that the lost boy had been found and returned to his parents. “Lost in the mead,” he said, giving out the vaguer story that Will had used, to excuse his magical imprisonment. “Hit his head, couldn’t find the way home.”

“Ach,” Owen Davies said, coming in from the kitchen, “that's a bad thing to be forgetting.”

“Yes,” Bran replied after a moment, “a very bad thing. To realize you have lost something so important, so fundamental – it gives a person a turn.” He watched his father for any reaction, but Owen showed none, his habitual impassivity still in place.

“And you will play with me at the Plygain tonight, Bran _bach_ ,” John Rowlands put in. “You ready for the watch?”

“If you have time to practice now, John, we might be well-fixed to do it,” Bran said. “They will not mind if we are not in form, but I will.”

“I do,” John said. “Did you leave all things well, in England?”

Bran ran a hand through his hair. “Well enough,” he answered. “For now. But it was time for me to come back.”

Glancing over to Owen, John rather perceptively inquired, “And do you think you will go back again?”

“Maybe? I don't know. Right now I'm mostly just tired. And hungry!”

“Let the boy be, John,” Owen said. “He's come home for Christmas, and to have a rest. Can't you see he's been working hard? There's food in the refrigerator, Bran, and in the pantry. Or if you like I will make you something hot.”

“I can,” John said. “And to good effect, from all I hear from Jen. We are very proud of you, _bachgen_ , your father and I.”

“Thank you,” Bran said.

After an afternoon of pleasant harping, followed by an evening of puttering about his room and the kitchen, he went with his father and John Rowlands down to the village church in the early hours of the morning on Christmas Day, before the first fingers of the dawn streaked the horizon.

They were not the only one present, no matter the earliness of the hours; the little stone building rang with voices, the echoes charitably covering up any deviance from proper pitch and bringing each together into a harmonious mass of human sound. They had brought the harps, carefully wrapped for transport, but took their turns among the singers, as well. There was plenty of time to fill with music before the break of the dawn.

Bran sang the traditional carols dutifully, contributing his part to the chorus; but as the light grew brighter through the high windows Bran found himself remembering again the way that Will Stanton’s face had looked in the morning light, the next day when they had gone back to Buckinghamshire and it was just the two of them, alone together in the attic bedroom, the sound of his voice saying Bran’s name … the night before, in that strange and starstruck hour of first-second meeting, Will's pale skin glowing wet and pale in the half-light …

 

He had carried Will back through the bog, the falling snow coming down around them in great bright flakes as though all the stars were slowly drifting down out of the heavens, at 4 am on the Solstice morning in the cold and wet of the marshes that fed the river's head. Will’s body had been bony in his arms, his breath wet and cold against Bran’s neck. The sensations had stirred Bran deeply, although with all of the revelations of the night he was already in such an excited condition that he barely registered the intensity of his response. Not until later, when the event had become a memory to be taken up and re-examined, could he note just how _much_ he had felt in that touch.

The other man was dressed only lightly, as though for autumn weather, in trousers and an oxford shirt, the cuffs of which now flapped soddenly around his bony blue-pale wrists. He had no coat or jumper.

The genius of the river had told Bran that Will couldn't die, that he was immortal. And maybe she was right. What did Bran know? But the person he had found hidden away at her roots looked a mess, pale and thin and soaking wet.

Bran peeled of his coat to wrap around Will's shoulders. He had questions that wanted answering, and he meant to have them answered – but not yet. Will didn't look up to questioning just yet. Bran determined that he was going to deal with things first; later, he would let himself think through everything else that had happened that night. But not now. He needed to get them out of the cold. They needed to get back to the car.

He hoisted Will up into a shoulder carry; “All right?” - and the answer came back again, mumbled and hoarse, “All right.” And Will had tried to help and hold on as they had set off across the mead, clutching at Bran's coat with weak and shaking hands.

The going overall was not too bad, though the ground was both icy and boggy-soft. Slung across Bran's shoulders, Will didn't seem to weigh nearly as much as he ought to. Maybe Tamesis had been wrong, Bran thought – maybe he really would have starved to death if he'd remained long enough in her watery grasp. But though he was thin and wasted, still Will was not dead – and any human man would have been, who had been kept under water without food or air for more than a month. So. Maybe he would not have died, but merely starved indefinitely.

Bran shuddered at the thought, and staggered on.

He did not know, later, how long it had taken him to reach the road again; by the time they were in the car park and he was kicking the passenger-side door of Max's car open to flop Will down into the seat, where he lolled in the dim illumination of the dome lights pale as any ghost, it felt to Bran as if an age had passed, or more. He straightened, jangling with dissociation as the fey events of the night were juxtaposed with the ordinary reality of Max's car, purloined from Paul – Paul, he'd left Paul stranded at the Manor house, it was surely too early for him to have discovered it but Bran had better try and remember to mention him to someone.

He closed Will's door and went around the front of the car, slinging himself into the opposite seat for a moment while he started the engine before popping out again to dig around in the boot. Where there were children, he figured there were likely to be blankets. He was right. Armed with several, and a road map for good measure, he circled back around to the passenger door.

Tucked into the human warmth of the car, Will was starting to come around a little. He looked up at Bran, silent, his dark eyes darkly gleaming, as the car door opened.

“I'm going to take you to the hospital,” Bran told him. He added, awkward, “If that's all right, I mean. I thought I'd tell them that I found you wandering around, you'd had a knock on the head and couldn't remember how to get home. It's not plausible, I know, but I'm counting on them being so happy to see you that they won't care.”

“It's all right,” Will said, his voice quiet and unperturbed. “'If anyone asks too much … I can fix it … it'll be all right.”

Which was pretty creepy, really. Bran threw the car in gear and reversed out of the parking lot, trying hard not to think about the way that Will Stanton could apparently “fix” things like people knowing too much.

The hospital was near, only a few miles’ drive through the dark, so close that signs indicating its location popped up almost as soon as they were out of the park. Will drowsed against the frosted pane of the passenger window, visibly sliding off out of consciousness once more. Bran was going to have to do his best to answer intrusive questions about who Will was and where he'd been without giving too much away, without giving Will away – without giving _himself_ away, _Iesu Mawr,_ he was all bound up in the business now, too. 

As he pulled up to the entryway, unreality gripped him once more – this time, because the signs and lights and pavement, the bright busy sterile space inside, seemed to him suddenly alien. So different from the dark green of the river, the face of the goddess, the endless trackless dreamtime he'd been wandering in for hours now. It had been a long time since he'd slept.

“Hi,” Bran said to the grey-haired woman at the front desk, Will's limp, damp body once more slung over his shoulder, “he's a missing person, he's been in the river, he's probably hypothermic. Can I use your telephone?”

He gave them both of their legal names, Will Stanton, Bran Davies.

Will had been taken from him by many hands, then, and he had been left alone at a desk, the bright illumination surreal on so little sleep. He began then to find himself back in plain reality, his senses settling. It had left him feeling weary. They handed him a phone, and looked up the number for him when he couldn't remember it. The phone had rung and rung at the Stanton's house, long enough that Bran, standing and fidgeting at the desk, started to worry he'd dialed the number wrong; but of course it was before 5 am still, and even the Stantons with their farmer's blood were all abed. At last Bran heard the click of the line being picked up, and Roger Stanton's sleepy voice mumbled, “...'lo?”

“Mr. Stanton? It's Bran Davies. Sit down, sir, I have news – good news,” quickly clarifying at the sound of the older man's sharply indrawn breath. “He's found,” Bran said. “Will. We're at the hospital in Cirencester – yes, I know, I had a … a hunch, I guess you could call it, and I found him up at Thames' Head. He's going to be all right. The nurse said we could wait for you to phone the police and everything.”

On the other end of the line, Mr. Stanton had begun, horribly, to weep. “Thank god,” he said, his voice choked and wavering with emotion and relief. “And thank you, Bran Davies, however you have done this.” And then he was shouting, off into the house, “Alice! Bar! Boys! Wake up, we've got good news! He's been found, Bran's found him! We're going to go and bring Will home, get up, get up!”

After a few moments' disorganized noise, another voice came from over the line; Max, evidently taking over from his strongly excited parent.

“Hello? Bran?”

“Max, hi.”

“Is it true? You have Will? Where are you?”

“At the hospital in Cirencester. It's true, Will's here. He's underweight and pretty hypothermic, but alive. He's even been conscious and everything. Remembered me from when we were kids. I guess he's had some memory loss, amnesia or some such thing, but it seems to be getting better – he knew you all when I mentioned you, he just hadn't been able to remember the way home.”

“Good lord. I'd given up hope, I think. Didn't know it till this very moment.” After a pause, Max's voice came, invigorated and filled with new purpose: “We'll get up there as soon as we can. It'll be a few hours. Is there anything you need?”

“Will and I could both use a change of clothes – something warm? Oh, and Max! Paul is stuck at Huntercombe Manor – I took your car last night and left him there with just a note, will you get him and let him know?”

“You took my car -? You know what,” Max said, “never mind. We'll stop for Paul on the way. Wait for us, Bran. Don't let him out of your sight.”

Bran drew a shaky breath at the intensity in Max's tone, the sense of a charge conveyed. “All right. See you soon.”

Another click as the line went dead in his hand.

Hanging up the phone, he stood for a moment at the desk, blinking into the light in dizzy overload and reaction. Then he turned, and went back to the room where Will's bed was.

A nurse was there, hanging a new bag of whatever nutrient solution they were using to remedy Will's state of malnourishment. Will's brow was furrowed, and he shifted restlessly in the bed. “He's been moving around,” the nurse said. “He might wake soon, but it's not bad for him to stay sleeping, either.”

Bran said. “All right.”

The nurse left. Bran sat down in the chair that was positioned close by the bed, near to Will's white and opened hand where it lay on top of the coverlet; near enough to touch, if he dared do it. Where he could see the old burn scar there on the inner wrist, the round pale circle quartered by the burned-in cross.

Bran watched as Will muttered and moved in uneasy half-dreaming, and reaching out in a spontaneous gesture laid the palm of his hand against Will's bearded cheek. Hazy blue eyes drifted open. When Will seemed to see him, he smiled radiantly, thin face stretching. Leaning into the pressure of Bran's touch, he said, softly, “My lord.” His eyelids fell and he lapsed back into unconsciousness, and Bran let him lie. Will Stanton, strange young man, both stranger and intimate, possessor of secrets Bran had not known he’d ever had, slept like the weary dead through the dawn.

 

Now, the bright light of the rising sun was coming in piercing rays through the church windows; it was Christmas morning. Bran sang, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with John and his father, ancient carols, in Latin, in Welsh. He wanted to tell his father about what he had learned at the river’s source. 

But, he realized then, his father – Owen – knew more than he had said. He had named Bran's dog "Cavall." He had told Bran – he had made sure – he never let him look for his mother. Why? Because he knew she had vanished hundreds of years into the mythic past?

Bran's heart was still divided when he went home with his father for a few hours’ rest, before the holiday meal at the Evanses later in the day; and when he woke, his mouth was closed, and words would not come to his lips to speak of the matter that monopolized his thoughts. Owen let him off of attending church that afternoon, telling him indulgently to sleep awhile, then drive down and meet them for supper.

In the farmhouse kitchen the world seemed to move around him in a blur of warmth and wafting scent. Jen Evans came over to give him a special hug, as soon as she was able. “Thank you,” she said. “You made a big difference for my friend.”

Difference, Bran thought, was one word for it; but he just nodded and smiled back at Mrs. Evans, enjoying the comfort of her kindness.

The good food, familiar traditions and holiday clowning took Bran for a time away from his thoughts into happy childish reminiscence. Lulled by wine and cheer, he nearly fell asleep at the table; John Rowlands, at the end of the evening, teased him awake with threats of a traditional Boxing Day holly whipping if he did not mend his layabout ways. It was just as it had always been; it was nothing like it had ever been.


	2. Chapter 2

In the dream that Bran dreamed in his narrow bed in Wales, the night after Christmas and the morning before Boxing Day, his perspective began at a high point, away up above a grey stone keep or castle bordered all around by barren deciduous winter forest. Then he was swooping downwards to the human scale like a bird on a downdraft.

Below him, a cavalcade of brightly-attired riders bore down on the keep. Awaiting them, a household stood all arrayed together in a line to welcome the honored guests. First among the riders was a man of young middle age. He had sandy brown hair that would likely have been a pale blond in his boyhood, and on his brow there was a kingly circlet of gold. Bran could not see his face, the wind whipping up his hair to hide his eyes. A woman with wild dark hair rode beside him, her horse prancing restlessly as though wanting nothing more than to break into a gallop. Behind them came many others, some dressed in armor, some in rich furs, and then behind these the retainers who saw to the comfort of the great ones during their winter Progress. 

They drew up to the door of the keep, and Bran watched as the kingly man embraced the lord of the house as one among his own kinsmen, clapping him heartily on the back. He put the lady’s hand into the old lord’s, and seemed to be nothing but happy about their arrival. Bran heard him say, part of a long string of happy chatter that began and ended out of Bran's earshot, “We have a particular guest for you, my boy – or, that is to say, a group of them, what’s come riding up out of the forest. Here’s Master Twyti, as what served your Royal Father, who seemingly has lived these last years with that Robin Wood – the outlaw, you know, that’s called ‘Hood’ in the songs.” The old lord clapped the young one on the shoulder, and Bran could not hear what he said next, or how the young lord – the young king? – responded.

Bran's attention swung away from the man and the lord and the lady, then, to the line behind him, where he glimpsed a familiar flash of straight brown hair, a slim, boyish figure waiting with a genial smile among the dogs. Will Stanton, it was, clad in a green woolen tunic and high-wrapped leggings, looking no more than twelve years old, but yet with age in his serious blue eyes. The startling effect was lightened somewhat by his bright, open visage, the real happiness with which he regarded the people and the animals gathered together in the festival snow.

The dream shifted, and in a rush Bran was caught up in a great cavalcade of belling hounds and trumpeting horsemen, the king’s red dragon banner unfurled in front of the Royal Hunt; and the king, who rode tall and proud beside his lady, was beaming like the sun in the crisp winter air. Will, riding in the midst of the group, was smiling, too, and it seemed to Bran that just before he awoke the boy became a sallow-faced young man, but his thin face smiled still, and Bran’s breath was caught when he sat up in his bed on Boxing Day in the morning by the sheer intimacy of that single look.

He let the breath out again in a long sigh, coming to befuddled consciousness, still with an overwhelming impression of his dreaming. His heart felt swollen with the images of his father and mother; and, differently, in response to the thought of Will.

He'd thought the dreaming would be over and done with, now that he'd found Will in the river and got him out. He rose and dressed, trying to shake loose the more unaccustomed sensations, but wary of losing a single image of that treasure-vision.

When he went out, his father was the only one in the room. “Good morning.” Owen said. “John’s gone in to town for the day. Some papers I’d like to go over with you, Bran _bach_ ; work you missed while you were off saving lost lads in England.”

There was a bite in his father’s tone; Bran did not respond to it, trying as always to hear the older man’s anxiety and affection, the real drivers of his needlessly sharp tongue. It had never been easy, loving his father; but it had always been worth it. And he could not claim to have been an easy son to care for, himself. So he lightly answered, “All right. I’m yours for the day.” 

It would be good to have the time alone with Owen. He had missed his da, being used to seeing him every day – and, if the day went well, maybe an opportunity would arise for an attempt at serious conversation. He still wasn't sure what it was he hoped to say. Something needed to be said, he felt. But he needed some time to settle himself, after the excitement of the morning.

They shared a simple breakfast together, and then took up the task of a thorough situation report and review. While the cold wind whistled over the snow-covered mountain peaks, Bran stood with his father at the worktable in his office, where Owen had spread out his most recently marked maps of the Davies farm. They were beginning to budget for supplies and equipment for the spring and summer. Owen thought that it would perhaps be worth the expense to purchase a foetal distress monitor for use in the lambing; they had lost a ewe and her lamb to an unexpected haemorrhage the previous year, and Owen was anxious to prevent a re-occurrence. 

“Let me have a look at the grants for this next year,” Bran said. “Might be I can move things around, secure a budget for new equipment.”

“I leave that in your capable hands,” Owen said. “The drafts from last year’s round of applications are all in that file folder, there.”

“Okay. Will get back to you with numbers in a few weeks, all right?”

“That should be fine,” Owen answered judiciously.

The Evans farm was doing as well as any establishment in the valleys; and Bran felt a pleased internal glow at the signs of their good stewardship, reflected there in the marks on the map of the farm’s lands and holdings. It was not as easy as it had once been to get government grants to fund agriculture; one place where Bran’s academic experience had been a benefit.

They broke for tea in the late afternoon. John was still not back, and the cottage was a warm and quiet bubble, slantingly sunlit, around them. 

Bran poured the tea for his father. “Da,” he said, sitting down at the table and wrapping his hands around his teacup protectively, “I’ve a serious question I’d like to ask you. Are you up to talking, a little bit, about my mother?”

Owen Davies swallowed, looked down, and then met Bran’s eyes and answered, “Yes. She’s been on your mind?”

“And yours, as often as not. Some of what I saw in Buckinghamshire, it brought her up to me. I suppose I’m still trying to work things out. It would help, I think, if you would speak openly with me. It hasn’t been your way in the past. I don’t mean to judge you, father, only to ask for you to share what you know with me now.”

“I thought there would be questions,” Owen said. “Since you started thinking again on the matter of the Stanton boy. I thought then that things were like to come back up. Always did before, when he was about.”

Bran wondered what that meant; he filed it away in the back of his brain, to turn over and think about later. He did not have the space at present. This wasn't really about Will; it was about himself that he was asking, and he needed to ask his father his question. “What do you know about where mother came from?” That wasn't the important question, but it was a place to begin, and he was doing his best.

“Very little,” Owen said. “Nothing that I would feel safe terming a fact.”

Pressing the question, Bran asked, “You don’t know much at all – or you’re not sure you can trust what you do know?”

“That last,” Owen admitted, apparently pinned under his son’s gaze.

“Will you share with me, then, the things that you are aware of, but doubt?” 

Just as he had pressed Will Stanton to surrender his secrets, as he had lain pale and thin before him in his childhood bed, so now he would press Owen Davies to give up his. There was no anger in it on Bran's part, certainly not so far as the matter involved his father; but he meant to know the things that had been kept from him come hell or high water, and he did not mean to give his father a choice in it, any more than he had given Will.

Owen sighed, his narrow shoulders curling inward. “Yes, all right,” he said hoarsely. And then he added, looking up to meet Bran's eyes, a sort of pathetic anxiety in his eyes that it pained Bran deeply to see, “I was worried that you might ask me something of that sort. I do not want to tell you anything that it will hurt you to know, Bran – make sure you want answers to your questions, remember that some things are better forgotten.”

“With respect,” Bran said, “I don't agree. 

Owen said under his breath, as if he only half wanted to be heard, “...ought to have known you would, going off after that boy the way you did. Told myself that you've just a noble nature, that you would have done the same for any other boy. Maybe you would have, I don't know, but the plain truth of the thing is that he's _not_ any other boy, and I remember what it was like, when he came here before. Both times changes, and secrets come out, for the better and – not.”

Again Bran heard the words about Will, and the other things that his father seemed to remember that he did not, and again he remained focused on his target. Careful and attentive, he said, “When she came down out of the mountains with me – ” and that was the first test laid there, a check that would confirm that he was not a child of Owen Davies' body, that he'd come into his father's life at the same time his mother had – “how much did you know, or ask, about where she'd come from?”

“I guessed – enough,” Owen said. “Enough to know that I did not want to ask.” And he didn't blink, or correct Bran's phrasing, which meant it must be true.

“You never told me,” Bran said, trying not to whine reproachfully, with some success.

“You did not need telling, once,” Owen answered. “When you lost – the memory – it was not my place to tell it you again, Bran _bach._ You had made your choice, and it was not for the likes of me to meddle with the work of such as them.”

“Da,” Bran said, “it is not meddling. I'm a grown man, now, and you're not the only authority on these secrets, either for me personally, or in any other way. Others have been telling me what they know, and you are intimately concerned – as am I. Please. I would speak openly with you of my mother. You are the only other person who lost her as I did. We are bound together in this, the two of us, alone of all men.”

Owen looked at him, long and piercingly. Then he sighed, and his narrow shoulders dropped. “Yes,” he said. “So. You know I am not your father by blood. I can see by your face that you also know other things, stranger things, too.”

After a short silence, he went on, “Your mother came down from the mountains when I was a young man. She had come to me through time, with you in her arms. She told me a wild story, that you were the son of the great King of Britain, that there was great peril about her and she was sore afraid of what was to come.”

Bran found himself breathing hard, as though he had run a race or been struck a staggering blow. Never had his father spoken to him like this. He had pressed for it, but he had not realized how it would feel, to be on the other side of his father's masks, sitting beside him as a man with another man, no more and no less. This father was not a king from legend, with the power to answer all riddles and change night to day; he was a human being, baffled with pain and love and aspiration. Bran saw him, very plain and clear, and loved his father dearly, terribly. The experience was dizzying. He choked out, “Did you know she would leave?”

“Yes – but not that she would leave you. I never thought she would leave you.” Owen sighed. “I don’t think I’d ever really hoped that she’d stay with me, not a fairy creature like she was. I will tell you honestly, Bran, that it was a bad time for me. There I was, a single shepherd, trying to take care of a delicate little babe, one with a depigmentation condition into the bargain. Terribly sensitive to daylight, you were at first. And I did not have _her_ , to help or guide me, her light lost to us…. Of all things, Bran, I am sorriest you did not know her. She was a radiant being, my Guenever. _Our_ Guenever.”

They sat together for the next several hours, Bran listening and replenishing the tea in their mugs, Owen pouring out the story of his great lost love to the most sympathetic of all possible listeners. Bran felt, in the deep places of his heart, a tight knot unraveling; it had always been there, it seemed, as far back as he could remember, and so he had never noticed its presence until it was loosened and gone.

John was back in the evening, and there were greeting all around. The mood in the cottage was light but quiet, Bran and Owen both processing in their own ways the expenditures and revelations of the day. Neither appeared to have much desire for speech; and when the supper had been cooked and eaten and washed up after, they all of them scattered to their separate pursuits.

Bran went into his room, closed the door, and sat down at his little desk to write a letter. Pulling a chain, he switched on the green-shaded glass lamp, and dug out a sheaf of notebook paper. He had corresponded with a few college friends, and had written letters home when he'd been away at school himself, but he had to admit it had been a few years since he'd put pen to paper for purposes other than business. He hesitated for a moment, teetering on the edge of awkwardness. Was he really going to commit himself, in writing, to this crazy set of fancies that he and Will Stanton had been concocting between them, even if his father did seem to confirm that it was not just their madness? 

More than that – was he going to open himself, in real honesty, to another being, to a peer? He'd never done much of that. He reflected, a bit startled by the thought, that perhaps he'd never really had a peer, before he'd found Will. He had always been different; now there was someone else to be different with. And it was not at all like being different with John Rowlands, peaceful and steady and rooted, unchanging; this was electric.

Was he going to acknowledge the increasing intensity of his own feelings? He had not defined them, yet, not even to himself. He didn't quite dare; but he very much wanted to write to Will, all the same. 

He wrote:

“Dear Will, 

It is near a week now since I fished you out of the river. I had a dream last night. You were in it, and a man that I think may have been my father, my birth father. It was Boxing Day, and you were hunting, with hounds and hawks. It only lasted for a moment, but I could see my father's face clearly. You looked happy. 

Hope you are well, and your family. I have spoken with my father here – with Owen. All this time, turns out he's known a good bit more than you'd think. We're square, he and I, and you need not worry of anything from that quarter either. 

If there is anything you can tell me about the things I dreamed, or the things we talked about last week, I hope you will tell me. I understand if there are some things you don't want to write in a letter, but please do at least tell me if you're going to be keeping secrets. I'm pretty wild to know anything and everything.

Your Friend,  
Bran”

Signing with a flourish, he tucked the letter into an envelope. He had Will's address, written down six days ago and tucked away safely in a corner of his pocketbook. He thought of making a run into Tywyn, to post the letter special, thus keeping it secret; but decided not to, there having been more than enough secrecy in his life of late. He did not need to be so fearful as to add to it; if anyone wanted to argue with him, let them. Anyway, there was nothing in it; just a note to a friend.


	3. Chapter 3

For the next few days of the Christmas season, Bran cooked with his father and walked on the hills and played with the dogs, and played the harp with John Rowlands and went to Chapel, and his sleep was dreamless.

It struck Bran more than ever, having been away for the first time in a good while, how quiet his home life really was: the two taciturn men he lived with, the little village, the mountains bare of all but wind. It was not that Huntercombe was a bigger place than Tywyn, so much as it was filled so much fuller with chattering. After the cheery verbosity of the Stantons, Clwyd life seemed to contain more than its fair share of silences.

For the moment, he had decided to enjoy it. The quiet was restful; and he was so very tired. But he knew that it would not do for ever; maybe not even for long. He was not looking to settle back into sleep. The holiday space, and then – a change, he thought. Some great change. To what, he had little concept. He was still turning over and over inside himself the new idea of who he was, or who he was meant to be. And, unvoiced, the question raised by his rescue of Will Stanton, and the manner of it: the question of what it meant to be human, or not-just-quite.

“Bran,” John said, one morning when Owen had gone early out on the farm, and the two of them sat eating their breakfast alone together, “I know you've had a lot to think about, of late. Things about your family, and your past. And it is a human trait, too, that you should feel the weight of the work you have just done; to sit with people through their grief – and, unless I am mistaken about what took place, to win a victory over great powers for the sake of another – these are great acts, boyo, but heavy ones, too.”

“I – yes,” Bran said, somewhat taken aback. All unprompted, John had given him an answer to the question he had not dared frame to his father: Spontaneously moved, Bran reached out across the table to clasp his old mentor's hands. “Thank you, John,” he said, “for everything you've done for me, and all you've taught me.” 

It was a true thing, he knew it well, that it had been John's teaching that had guided him through the challenges of the last weeks, John's lessons in human nature and compassion, and his lessons about the old ways, the spirits of stock and stone, the sacral history of the land, gently taught to him throughout his boyhood, that he had been able to adapt to the circumstances he'd found in Buckinghamshire.

“You're welcome,” John said, clasping back. “Only remember: that you yourself are responsible for no man's burden.”

“I know it,” Bran said. 

John mentioned, diffidently, “I saw, when I took the post, day before yesterday, that you'd written to the Stanton boy. When he was here, before, things always seemed to be difficult and disturbed. If there is anything you need to talk about, now, know that I am always available to listen.”

“Of course.” 

Bran was flustered, both by the mention of the sensitive subject of his letter to Will, and by the cautious reserve that was evident in the older man's manner. He thought, as he finished his tea and followed John to the front rooms where the harps sat waiting, that he was not sure if he could rely on John in this. John had been his teacher, but he had gone now further on; and John might not be able to understand, with his warm human heart, the world that Bran was finding – was, if he understood right, returning to. 

Would John understand about the person Bran could feel himself unfolding out into, a person more commanding, and more responsible, than he ever had been before? John understood about many things – but the warning about Will's disruptiveness gave him cause to think that John might not understand about this one. John would warn him away from fantastical persons; he would think them, at best, not for human concourse. John was a true humanist; and it was humanity he best loved. Bran, now, seemed to be on a divergent path. He never had been the humanist John was. He had seen too much of their own type of coldness, of the human tendency to cruelty and viciousness in the face of the unknown.

The more human part of his feelings, John would be able to understand all too well – but those were not things he was ready to voice, and certainly not to the men he lived with, who had raised him in their own well-meaning but traditionalist way.

That morning, he and John made to run their repertoire, not pushing for any new pieces, but enjoying the renewed pleasure of the familiar act of making music together. The harp strings under his hands were taut and strong, and as they vibrated he felt held and enveloped by the music that they were shaping out of the wood and gut. It was like a series of embroidered loops and gates, unlocking thoughts and feelings, sensations and memories. John was not wrong about one thing, at least – it had been heavy, what he had been through before Christmas, going down in wells of deep sadnesses, and then taking on the peaks of revelations of mysteries, and finally the great joyful rush of finding one who had been lost, when so many of the lost were gone forever, never to be found. 

That was something he would remember, he knew, for the rest of his life. As they played on, working deeper into the pattern of theme and variation, inversion and counter-variation, Bran indulged himself with the memory, letting the good recollections come back to the surface of his mind and blot out the discomfort of his doubts and John's worries.

 

The Stantons had arrived en masse in the Cirencester hospital shortly after 7, waking Bran from the light doze he'd managed after that night of wild solstice wandering. Their appearance had heralded a sudden and rather overwhelming influx of excitement and activity, and for a moment Bran was quite dazed and stupid. Mr. Stanton was – still? – crying freely as he pumped Bran's hand, and they were all of them crowding round to touch Will, putting hands on his shoulders, legs, arms, feet. Will, like Bran just blinking back to consciousness, looked more than a little overwhelmed himself, but there being nothing Bran could do for it, he abandoned him to his fate and stood, moving back away from the family cluster to gain clearer footing. 

Soraya, her eyes bright with professional engagement, had cornered the nearest nurse and begun demanding access to Will's charts.

Bran found, to his surprise, that he was tearing up at the edges; and he thought of his father, and then of his mother, and would have started to cry in earnest if he had not exercised strict control. He did not know what Will was saying to his parents; he did not really want to know. 

Paul detached from the clustered group around the bed and came over to him. “That was some brainwave you must've had last night,” he said, bumping Bran's shoulder with his own in a comradely gesture. “I couldn't make heads or tails of that note, when I finally found it – but luckily by then Robin had already beaten down the door and woken me, so I didn't have time to speak of to worry about you, you absolute lunatic angel of a Welshman.”

“I'll take that,” Bran said, grateful for the steadying bite of Paul's wry teasing. “It worked, Paul, so I've got to take it that I went by the rights.”

“You're just lucky I didn't have to go hacking across the countryside on foot this morning; I wouldn't be nearly so pleased with you as I am.”

“You must be about done in, Bran,” Barbara said, also detaching; “Can I get you anything? Coffee, breakfast? Are you warm enough?”

“Yeah, I'm good,” Bran said. “Tired, but good. Do you know how long we'll be, here? What happens now? Do I have to talk to the police, or anything like that?”

One of the nurses offered, “Your friend should be able to be discharged to his family, as soon as we get the paperwork through. As long as he's reported found, everything should be fine. I don't know if the doctor will want him back for anything – I don't think so, he seems to be recovering well, given first aid and fluids, now that we've got him warmed back up.”

“You don't need to worry about all that,” Barbara said. “What you probably ought to do is to come with me right now, and anyone else who wants to ride along, and we should take either Max's car, or one of ours, and start home. We've all seen Will, alive and safe, and we don't all need to stay hanging about here in a crowd. Bran, you get to kip in the front seat.”

She chivvied round, and soon it was decided that she and Max and Paul would drive back with Bran now in Max's car, to rest up at the Stanton house, and to relieve James and Marilyn, who had agreed to stay with the kids while the adults investigated the scene at the hospital, to give Soraya the chance to be on-scene. The others would rejoin them when Will was discharged. 

Mrs. Stanton said, “I have clean clothes for you here, Bran. Why don't you change before you go? Here, Gwen, grab Bran's clothes out of my quilted bag.” She smiled up at him, a weary and satisfied smile, from where she sat stroking through a drowsing Will's hair. “I have clean things for Will, too,” she told the nurse, who nodded.

“We'll give him a bath when he wakes up – most fun part of the job,” the nurse said.

The first round of these departures being on their feet and ready to shove off, Bran found himself hesitating in the doorway, looking back before he left the room just to be sure it hadn't all been a hallucination. In the bed, Will had dropped back off into heavy sleep. The rest of the group was settling in around him to wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn, and their lost lamb to be ready to be moved. None of them were demanding any answers, or pressing him for the secrets that were not his to share. Maybe they would, later, but Bran suddenly thought not. If anyone was accustomed to Will's reticence, it seemed to be his family.

Swallowing, Bran surrendered the watch and let Will's siblings lead him away, trusting the Stantons to make sure that Will wouldn't vanish again into thin air if he left the scene for a while. He was tired, and needed to eat and rest – but there were things they needed to talk about, he and Will. He _would_ have satisfaction from the wizard, if only in payment for his night's pains.

After a stop at a family bathroom to shuck his muddied, travel-stained things and put on the clean t-shirt and track pants that Alice Stanton had packed for him – he didn't know whose they were, certainly not his own – Bran felt almost ready to face the morning. Almost, until they stepped out into the day and the sunlight hit him. Already nearly cross-eyed with weariness, the brightness of it was more than he could bear, and he winced and reached up to cover his face. Quickly, Paul slipped him a pair of sunglasses, and Bran took them with silent but expressive gratitude at having been noticed and helped so effectively. Paul was all right, he thought.

He dozed in the car, and by the time they'd made it back to the Stanton house he was too tired to protest when Max showed him to a room he'd not entered before – the master bedroom, it must be – and pushed him toward the big four-poster bed in its center. Too weary to protest, Bran was asleep again before his head hit the goosedown pillows. 

When he woke next, the little clock on the bedside table told him that it was 4:30, after tea-time. The bedroom around him was still and dark; who knew how active or noisy the rest of the house might be, on the other side of the heavy oak door? Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Bran heaved himself up and set off in search of water, and maybe something for headache, as his was rather throbbing. Food might help, too, now that he thought about it. Or maybe a shower. There was little he could think of that _wouldn't_ leave him feeling more human. A win-win situation.

His hand on the doorknob, on the edge of opening the bedroom door, he froze, suddenly arrested by his own internal idiom. “Freak,” they'd called him, when he'd been a little boy. Said he must be a changeling or a fairy. And here he was, having secrets with wizards, river-goddesses calling him “sister-son.” 

... But then again, the Stantons certainly still wanted their half-human wizard, didn't they? Where did that leave him, Bran Davies?

Shaking himself, Bran turned the knob, and went out into the busy, gold-lit space of the house. Although it was only afternoon, this close to the solstice the sun was down already, and all of the lights were on. From the noise level, he guessed that all the Stantons were at home.

Squaring his shoulders, he headed down the stairs to find out what was afoot.

In the kitchen, several of the adult Stantons were mostly sitting about with drinks and snacks. Paul and Gwen were playing cards, James and Marilyn cracking nuts. In the front room, Max and Deb had the little kids making paper chains, and there was Christmas music coming in relentless waves of cheer over the wireless.

“Bran!” Paul said, getting up and ushering Bran to his own seat at the table. Instantly, hands reached out to pat him on the back and clap him on the shoulder. 

“Awake already?” James said. “By all rights, you're owed about another 10 hours of sleep.”

“I don't know how long I'll make it,” Bran admitted with a wry smile. “I'm still pretty done in. But also _starving._.” 

Gwen laughed. “We can fix that,” she said. “Have a pick at anything you like that's out, and I'll heat you up a bit of meatloaf. All right?”

“Sounds great,” Bran said, his mouth already full of orange slices. He thought he might never have tasted anything so delicious. The meatloaf, when he tried that, ran a close second.

“Hallo there, Bran. Soraya and Mom and Dad are all upstairs with Will,” Robin filled Bran in, coming in with the baby on his shoulder. “He looks good, they're going to keep him on an iv overnight.”

Gwen frowned. “I'm still not sure it makes practical sense to put him all the way up there in that attic,” she said.

“Mum and Dad thought the familiarity was important, and I'll back them on that,” Robin said. “Will's always loved that attic. He used to go there when he was little, to feel safe with Steve. None of us have bad knees. We can climb up to him.”

It was an impassioned speech for taciturn Robin. “Yes, well,” Paul said at last, after the stunned aftermath had passed among the Stanton siblings, “Will's upstairs, Bran, if you'd like to have a look at him before you head back to sleep.”

“All right,” Bran said, a bit awkwardly; but no one questioned his right to go.

At the top of the house in the attic bedroom the lights were low and comforting. Mrs. and Mr. Stanton were both seated at the bedside. The intravenous equipment was an unobtrusive streak of silver at the head of the bed, and Soraya was busy shifting hot water bottles and electric blankets about at the foot, to keep her “patient” comfortable as he rested.

“Hi,” she whispered to Bran. “He's been resting well all day, and the doctors gave him a good report before he was discharged. The memory loss he sustained before may be permanent – he must have hit his head, it's the only thing that makes sense – but it's long-healed now of course. No long-term damage from the exposure, although his lungs are going to be weak for a while.”

In the bed, Will was curled into deep slumber, dressed now not in his wet shirt but in a burgundy sweatshirt. His over-long hair had been washed and brushed back from his face. His breathing was low and gentle. The wrists of the sweatshirt covered the burn scar of the quartered circle on his inner wrist. 

“If you want a shower,” Soraya whispered, and in the dark Bran blushed at the acknowledgement that he smelled a bit ripe, “there's a lovely one in the master suite.”

Taking the exit line, he said his good-nights and fled to the sanctuary, first of hot water, then of sleep.

He next woke with a strong sense of deja vu, once more in the unfamiliar four-poster bed. It was morning, this time, if only barely. He rose, found his suitcases positioned by the door, dressed in a clean set of his own things, and set off in search of tea and sustenance. He still felt like he could eat a Christmas dinner to himself.

He found Mrs. Stanton sitting with Gwen, baby Lainey, and a pretty girl with long, shining straight hair that Bran hadn't met in the kitchen, empty saucers of tea at their elbows. 

“Good morning, Bran,” Mrs. Stanton said with a smile, rising and coming to embrace him.

“Good morning,” he said, appreciative of her politeness in the face of the late hour. She did not offer effusive thanks, either, for which he was also grateful; the squeeze of her hand on his shoulder as she released him said everything she could have wanted. It _was_ a good morning.

“Hi,” the strange girl said, “I'm Mary Stanton, nice to meet you. I gather you saved my baby brother's life.”

More of them, there were? How did Will keep track of them all?

“Oh,” Bran said evasively, “yes, well. I'm glad he's going to be all right. It's very nice to meet you.” He fixed himself a cup of tea, then came to sit by Alice and the baby – and then remembered that he had been exiled to the Manor in the first place because, with all the holiday comings and goings, there had been no room at the Stanton inn. "I'm sorry to have put you out of your own bed,” he said shamefacedly to Mrs. Stanton.

“Don't you worry,” she said. “We spoke to your father, earlier. He was at the farmhouse when I rang to give Jen the good news. He says to tell you that it's best for you to rest today, and travel tomorrow. He can come himself to pick you up in Tywyn. And it will be no trouble at all for Max to drive you up to the train in the morning. We owe you much, much more than that.”

“Oh,” he said, “thank you. That sounds good. Yes, I suppose I have missed my ride with Rhys! I appreciate your thinking of it, Mrs. Stanton.”

Embarrassed, he dropped his eyes to his tea, and Alice Stanton again had mercy. What she said next, though, was not substantially more comfortable: 

“Will seemed to be waking up, Roger said, when he came down just a while ago. Barbara is sitting with Will now. Would you like to take a tray of breakfast up, and have something to eat with him? The nurses said to maintain constant small meals, as much as possible, to help his digestion recover.”

Bran swallowed. It was one thing, to find Will Stanton in a bog in a moment of transcendent glory in the middle of the night, and another thing all together to be confronted by the reality of him, present here in the busy, beating heart of the Stanton home where Bran himself had grown so comfortable. With Will in it, the place was entirely changed, no longer the house that Bran had first entered with Jen Evans. Now it was not empty, or grieving. Now, it was full of secrets, some of them his.

“Yes, all right,” he said. 

At that point, the quiet of the late-morning house was abruptly ended as, with a great stomping of boots and swirling of scarves, a party of Max, Deb, Paul, and the older Stanton grandchildren came piling in at the door. Taking in the flow of boisterous children and garrulous adults, Bran readily grabbed the breakfast tray of plain broth, applesauce, toast, and a glass of lime green sports drink, with a dish of eggs, sausage, and toast for himself, and made his escape up the stairs with it. Will might be intimidating, but at least, from all Bran knew of him, he was quiet.

The attic bedroom was bright and sunny, the curtains all pushed back from the windows, and the skylight blazing down onto the bed. Behind the glow, at first, Will's shape in the bed seemed indistinct and shadowy.

Barbara, who had been sitting at the bedside with a magazine, stood up and stretched. “Good morning, Bran,” she said. “Look, Will, wake up again. Here's Bran with some breakfast. Oh for heaven's sake. He's dozed off again. Come on, dozyboots, wake up for a while. Honestly, what a slug.”

“Good morning,” Bran said awkwardly, coming further into the room and handing Barbara the laden tray to slide onto the nightstand. The glare of sunlight abated, and he could see Will, lying there pale as bone and still as snow in the bed of his childhood. 

On waking, Will looked right up at him, eyes wide and dark, the sea-blue of the irises swallowed up by the black of his pupils. Under the weight of that gaze, the thought went flashing through Bran's mind that he did not know how much his senses took in, or how much does Will knew of his mind, and he felt the beginning of fear. 

But then he firmly squelched it. So Will Stanton was an Old One. Bran had practically been raised by John Rowlands, and no-one could see through a person's skin like old John. This was not more than he could handle. 

“Good morning,” Will said. His voice was hoarse and jagged from long disuse, lower than the voice of the small boy that Bran had known. He did not know if he would have recognized it. But other things were very familiar, including the hesitant tone.

“I'm going to head down and see the kids,” Barbara said, giving Bran's shoulder a squeeze – just like her mother's, she must have learned the trick at home. “You two have fun.”

For the first time since the fen and the river, he and Will were alone. Bran breathed out a long breath and dropped to sit on the bed, Will's recumbent body warm and solid beside him. “I don't know if you've noticed, mate,” he said, “but you've got a bloody loud family. And there's really a lot of them into the bargain.”

“Thank you,” Will said. “For returning me to them. I never meant to abandon –”

Bran fidgeted a little with his hands, shifted his feet. “I'd say 'it was nothing,'” he said, pulling a quick strained smile, “but it it would seem quite the understatement, all things considered.”

“No,” Will insisted, his face solemn and lined with ageless knowing. “You are the only one who could have done it, Bran.”

The sound of his name in the other man's mouth, correctly pronounced and English-accented, was painfully familiar to Bran, and he wanted to hear Will say his name again. 

Then Will seemed to sharpen, somehow, becoming more fully awake. “But you oughtn't to have been able to,” he said, more urgently, “Bran, because you oughtn't to have known –” 

He was moving, struggling to sit up, and in the movement he was human again, a young man about Bran's same age, though clearly worn by his experiences. The perception freed Bran's tongue to speak with candor.

“Look, if this is about 'Pendragon,'” he said, taking note of Will's sudden indrawn breath at the sound of the name, “I know more than you might think. Been finding out all sorts of interesting things, these last few weeks. I ought to have come to England sooner.”

Will looked stricken with horror, his pale face blanched, lines of stress and tension were marked around his mouth. “I don't –” 

Bran took mercy on him, in turn for Will's mother's gentleness. He said, softly, “From what I can tell, an awful lot of things happened to us, you and me, when we were kids. And it seems like I probably forgot all of it for a reason. Maybe as the result of some sort of spell or enchantment? And it seems like you're supposed to keep the details of your life from your family. Am I on the right track with this so far?”

Will nodded, eyes wide and dark.

“Okay,” Bran said. “So far, so good. The river-spirit, Tamesis, said that you'd lost part of yourself in childhood; she was going to count it the same as a child death, and I guess holding the spirits of lost dead children is something that she does? But by my blood I could command her, so it turns out. You also have the huntsman, Herne, to thank for some of this, just so you know.”

“You saved my life,” Will said. And then he added, hesitant, hoarse, “My lord.” From out of fathomless eyes, dark in his pale and starveling face, Will gazed at Bran searchingly, and with something like longing. Then he sighed. “You haven't remembered,” he said, and it was not a question; his voice was low, gentle, even tinged with regret.

“I have not,” Bran said, “but I have been informed that I lack certain information about myself, and about you; I know that we have a history together, that I have somehow forgotten. I know your name, and mine. Later, I mean for you to give me a full explanation of all these things, but for now, I will protect your secrets.”

“You've grown up,” Will said, a strange non-sequitur. “Bran. I missed you. I should –”

Looking at Will now, Bran knew, with a degree of insight that he could not account for, what was going through the wizard's mind, the spells of forgetting that Will was reaching for under that internal commandment – the power hidden in those pale hands.

He could have been badly frightened, Bran reflected, by the conversation – by Will, by the threat to himself, his self-knowledge, his identity. That last was certainly being threatened from all directions: by the River, who had told him his secrets; by this bedraggled wreck of an English man, skinny as a reed in his childhood bed; by the sudden turn and tide of change that seemed now to have Bran firmly in its grasp. For years, nothing in his world had changed; now it was all fallen to pieces at his feet in the space of a night and a morning.

But he was not afraid. 

He said, roughly, “You should not. I have found you out, and that is not a mistake for you to _fix_ , wizard or no.”

“It was not the choice you made, before,” Will said, looking miserably at him from the bed. “And it is my responsibility to keep the right, as it was settled then.”

“Did you do it to me then?” he asked. “Were you the one who wiped my mind?”

Will dropped his eyes. “No,” he said. “My masters did it; they did not make me act on you directly. An unexpected mercy.”

“Then I say it is not your responsibility to maintain their work directly. And I tell you that you _will not_ erase my memories again.”

Will swallowed, hesitated, and at last nodded his head, a ducking gesture of submission and deference.

Bran swallowed, too, and then after a long thick moment he inclined his pale head a few arrogant degrees, a lord of noble stature graciously accepting a pledged gift of fealty. 

They sat quietly for a moment, both worn, both tired, needing to catch breath and gather thoughts. 

Bran said, “So. I can see why you did not ever get in touch with me again, when we were kids.”

“Yes.”

“You should eat some of that broth. Your mum made it up special, you know.”

“All right.” Will tentatively sipped some broth, and Bran lifted his own mug, enjoying the clean, tannic bite of his tea under the sweetness of the added honey. Will tasted the sports drink, and pulled a face, and then Bran was laughing at his obvious dismay, as comfortably as if they were the oldest of old friends.

It was incredible. Being around Will Stanton was the most intense thing Bran had ever experienced, the other man's inexplicable familiarity making the space between them strangely electric, jolting, catching at something in his chest behind his ribs.

“I made a promise to the river,” Bran said, the confession bubbling up.

Will looked back up at him, then, scrutinizing. “For me?” he asked.

Bran nodded affirmatively.

“What did you promise her?”

“I – nothing specific. She asked if she could have some of my time. I told her that she could. I suppose that means that I'm bound to come back here – or somewhere on the Thames, at any rate. Could go to London. I've never lived in a city.”

“Neither have I,” Will said. “You were lucky; it might have been much worse. The wild magic drives hard bargains. But I warn you, do not try to cheat her. You'd regret it.” His tone was stern and serious, but his eyes had drifted half-closed, exhaustion creeping back over him again. Around them, the room was bright and warm.

Bran thought, then, to ask, “Was it because of you, the dreams I've been having? Or is that something else?”

Will's eyes opened again, but only made it to half-mast. “What were the dreams?”

“We were together, as boys; there was a great storm in one, and – ah, I cannot remember it all now. I was not the only one dreaming; at least your mother and your Aunt Jen were getting them too.”

“Ah,” Will said, a soft exhalation of – what emotion? Fear? Relief? Chagrin? “Yes, it was because of me. And her. They were my memories, being washed away by the water that was flowing over me. If you had not come for me, they would all have washed away in time, and then I would have been truly lost. I did not realize they would drift through dreamspace like that, to the other people concerned – or to people close to me? I'm not sure. Everything that should be in my head is still there, though.” 

Bran shuddered. Will looked at him, cocking a perceptive eyebrow. “I don't know what choices I made as a child,” Bran said, “but I wouldn't choose now to lose any of my memories. They're what make up _me_ , my experiences and perceptions, and if you took them away you would be taking away a part of my living self.”

Will nodded, then looked down. The set of his mouth became solemn. “I still feel as though I'm failing you, by not putting things back to rights,” he said. “It was through my weakness that you were drawn back in to these matters, which you had before abjured by your own free choice. You should not have to pay a price for my fault –.”

He did not say _my lord_ again, but Bran could tell he'd started to, and then pulled himself back. 

“Do you know that you speak differently when we are talking of magic? Like you're a whole different person. If that's what the river was on about, Will, I hate to tell you, it maybe had a point. 'Abjured,' _Iesu Crist,_ man, you sound ridiculous. You're being ridiculous. You admit weakness, but in the same breath insist on taking responsibility for everyone else – what makes you think you could handle that, even if I would let you?”

“Because that's what I am,” Will said, snapping a little, albeit without much energy, “and that's what I'm for.”

“An Old One of the Light,” Bran said. “The river told me. It's a startling title, admittedly. Doesn't mean you're the 'lamb of god that taketh away the sin of the world.' You aren't god, wizard, so stop playing at it.”

“Nor am I human,” Will responded in a whisper, as though he were admitting a great shame. 

“From what I understand, neither am I, if we're rounding up,” Bran shot back.

“You must understand,” Will said, and his tone was yet heavier, “it's not just that I'm an Old One. I'm the last, the Watchman of the Light. All the others are gone, and I alone am left behind here, to tend to their works.”

That, Bran reflected, sounded bloody rotten.

It frustrated him, hearing Will speak in that weighed-down, hopeless way. He snapped, “All right, then, go around your moral dilemma or whatever it is entirely. I won't give up what I know, not without resistance. It can't be your fault if I fight you and win, can it? You think I wouldn't win? You just see if you are able, as you are now, to take me.”

“You would win,” Will said wistfully. “But I would never fight you … my lord.” He had hesitated before adding that last honorific, as if weighing the risk; hearing it, Bran nodded again, with the gesture accepting the gifts of fealty and deference that Will was apparently willing to grant him. 

“Is this how it always was?” Bran asked, falling into wistfulness himself. “Between you and me, I mean. Was it always this – easy, this right?” He was not used to this frank exchange of deepest secrets, given and accepted, and it was as compelling as it was novel.

Will dropped his eyes, swallowed convulsively, looked back up. “Always,” he said. “No one has ever been as good a friend to me as you were.”

“As I am going to be,” Bran corrected him. “I'm not letting go of you again, Will Stanton. We are not finished, you and I.”

Their eyes caught and held, until Will, nodding, suddenly nodded off, his head surrendering to the gravitational pull of his pillows. 

Will was still quite weak, Bran could tell. Inwardly, he was frustrated – he had the space of just this one day, and then he was going to need to get himself back to Wales. And the member of the Stanton family he most wanted to talk to couldn't seem to keep his eyes open for an hour at a time.

Gathering the used dishes on the tray, he made his way back down from the sunlit attic. James cornered him in the hallway, on his way down to the kitchen. Unlike Will's delightfully tactful mother, this second-youngest brother was an effusive one. “Thank you a thousand times over,” James said, taking Bran by the shoulders, Bran's hands not being free, and gripping him genially. “I don't know if you understand what you've done for this crazy family by getting my little brother back for us.”

“I do,” Bran said. “See that you keep him, this time.”

“I'll try,” James said. “We always have, you know. Tried. It can be difficult, with Will. He doesn't always let a person in. I don't think he's really told any of us the truth about his feelings, not since he was a little kid. But we do our best. I – well, thanks, again. You're a real brick, Bran Davies.”

 

“Dear Bran, 

I was very glad to receive your letter. If everyone else in my family didn't remember you being here, too, I would wonder if I hadn't dreamed you, wished you up out of dust and memory. It's good to have something to hold in my hand, something that you touched with yours. 

Mother is well, and says that the change in feed helped a great deal with the rabbits, and ta for the sound advice. Soraya and Robin haven't had any offers on the farm, but it's early yet, only just clear of the holiday, so who knows. Father and Gwen have both teamed up on me; I am not allowed to go home, but must stay with mum and dad another month. Gwen is enjoying having someone to boss, I think. So you can keep writing to me at this address, if you like.

It was your father in the dream. I didn't know him well, and most of the times I met him were at your side, as part of our quests. But I was there that Christmas at Camelot, and – I wanted to share the image, so that you would know what he had looked like. It is a thing I can do, with intention. It happened in the river without my willing it. I am sorry that I have not been able to share my memories of your meetings with your father. I have tried. It is not my spell that binds you, and its workings are opaque to me. He spoke to you with affection and pride. You were everything he had ever wanted in an heir. He was terribly sorry that he had not been able to raise you, that he had missed out on your childhood. He loved you dearly, and still does, though now he has passed beyond time. Please believe me; I will only ever be honest with you.

Enclosed you will find a story I wanted to share with you, about a boy who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is the last-born of a magical order, called the Old Ones. If you do not mind, I will send you more of these stories – I would like to share them with you, and this should be a safe way of doing it, although I would prefer that they remained for your eyes alone. I have never shown them to anyone else before.

How is your father – Mr. Davies, I mean? Aunt Jen said you had good weather for Christmas, when we spoke on the phone.

Please write again.

Yours,  
Will Stanton”


	4. Chapter 4

The night before Bran had been set to travel home from Buckinghamshire, returning to his own life and habits in Wales after the disruptive, transformative period he'd spent with the Stantons, he'd watched as Robin and James carefully carried Will down the stairs, their clasped arms forming a makeshift chair. It had been determined that the lost lamb was well enough to be publicly exhibited. Will appeared alert, awake, but he remained quiet, speaking little. The prodigal son was installed on a sofa in the front room, bundled in blankets and fortified with hot-water bottles. The scene was nearly comical, for all the world as if Will was some enthroned vizier in a pantomime. But then there was Mrs. Stanton, sitting on the sofa beside her son, his feet in her lap, and a contented, weary smile on her face, a reminder of how near to tragedy they all had come, and how unexpectedly good was the boon that had spared them.

The lights in the room were low, and Bran understood why when Gwen and Barbara came in from the kitchen, singing and carrying a lighted birthday cake. The little candles through shadows up through the boughs of the decorated Christmas tree, making the room magical and mysterious in the way that only raw fire can. 

He hadn't thought, with all the goings on – but, of course, Will had spent his birthday unconscious in the hospital, in Cirencester. Bran joined in the singing as Barbara brought the cake to rest on the coffee table in front of her baby brother, who leaned in and blew the handful of candles out.

Gwen cut the cake and distributed it on small plates, and then for a time, all was forks and plates and the girls' sticky child hands.

A piece of cake sitting uneaten in his lap, Will sat watching his family; James and Marilyn feeding each-other cake, Mary fiddling with the radio, the kids running up and down the hall playing space explorers, Soraya reaching over repeatedly to contain the baby as it made numerous attempts to maul the wrapped gifts beneath the tree.

An idyllic scene; and, to his surprise, Bran did not feel excluded from it, or alienated by the cozy domesticity. He felt, pleasantly, as though he had a place there.

Will turned his head and sought Bran's gaze. Their eyes locked, and Will half-smiled, looking awkward and shy. The blush that rose on Will's throat was distracting; Bran swallowed, and flushed, himself, his body responding despite himself.

He leaned forward to say, “Happy birthday, then. I didn't know, or I'd have said so before. Are you twenty-seven or twenty-eight?”

“Twenty-seven,” Will answered.

“He speaks!” James said, putting on a booming sportscaster voice.

“At least you remember that much,” their mother said with a sigh.

“'Course I do,” Will muttered, rather defensively. 

So Bran was older than Will by a good five months. Although, from what he'd come to understand, Will couldn't really be said to be younger than anyone, including all of his older sibs. What a surprise that must have been, when first found out. Will seemed to be aging normally – how did it work, his strange immortality? Bran wondered if even he knew.

He and Will could not discuss the great secrets that sat between them, not with all of the Stantons crowded about and ready to overhear anything interesting. In a way, it was a relief; it meant that they had to sit together as man and man, not creature and lord, there in the warm homey space of a family Christmas. 

Instead, they sat and listened as James began a story, with many brotherly embellishments, of the winter when Will had turned eleven, when there had been a record freeze. Mary, passing out cups of tea, joined in, calling from across the room, “and we had that awful flood!”

“It was so very cold, over Christmas that year,” Will said. “I had to stay over at the manor, and I was awfully worried about mum, remember, we thought she'd broken her leg?”

“I met you for the first time not long after that, didn't I?” Bran asked. 

Will nodded, then answered aloud, “Not quite a year after. The following fall.”

“For such a well-mannered and even-tempered person, Will has certainly been his share of trouble,” Mr. Stanton admitted. “Such a fever he had that year! We nearly thought we'd lost him, more that once.”

Was it because of some magic, that they were not pressing more urgently for answers about where Will had been lost, this most recent time, or the role that Bran had had in finding him? Was it some great conscientiousness in this family, to not ask what could not be believably answered? Or was their love for even their stranger members strong enough to overcome habitual concealment and secrecy? Bran felt more sympathy, now, for his own father, keeper of great secrets down long years; when the intact secret was the condition to the continuation of a family, perhaps concealment could even be a sort of grace. Will could not tell them his secret, but they loved him all the same, risking loss and heartbreak with reckless trusting warmth.

Will fell asleep on the sofa, there in the grouping of his family by the evergreen tree. And when, the next morning, Bran climbed the attic stairs before leaving to return to Wales, Will was still asleep. Bran did not have the heart to wake him. 

And so he had left England, not following a fight – or even a kiss – or a great confessional with Will, but with a happy evening with the Stantons all together. 

 

But more and more, as the weeks wore on, he found himself regretting that loss of a chance for a kiss. The winter was wearing on toward the eventual promise of spring, and thoughts of kissing Will were becoming increasingly distracting to his mind, not helped by the ongoing stimulus of a burgeoning correspondence with the man.

Fat envelopes with alternating English and Welsh postmarks had made their way through the mail with notable frequency over the course of the last months. Eventually, Bran had snapped at John Rowlands and his father, telling them that he did not want to hear any more twitting about his pen-pal, thank you very much. He suspected that Will's family would be just as intrusive and informed, if not moreso; Alice Stanton was very good at extracting confidences, in his experience of her, and his letters went through her post-box before they got to Will. 

Still, Bran's sense of embarrassment and exposure couldn't begin to compete with the way he found himself looking forward almost desperately to Will's letters, always coming with their enclosed stories of a past he could himself no longer remember, starting with a beginning like, “I want to tell you about how Merlin came to the son of Arthur, and told him to expect a wizard boy to come to his valley in Wales, on a great quest that was part of the defense of the world”; or, “I want to tell you about how the boys together traveled into the Lost Land, and met Owain Glyndwr, and gained and lost a flaming sword”; or, “I want to tell you about how Arthur, as a Lord of the Light, once set his son, all unknowing, a riddle, and of how he answered it.” What reticence there had been in the other man's manner was erased in this different format, with its slight degree of displacement. As long as he did not have to speak of himself in his own person, Will was a fountain of information and confidences, ready and eager to tell and share.

And in the letters, also, Will asked after Bran, and Bran's concerns, in a way that touched and surprised him. Bran was not accustomed to being – _prioritized,_ like that. He found himself expressing more thoughts and plans than he had ever thought he had, in the letters he sent Will in return. The renewed friendship was richer than any he had ever known. 

This week, the envelope from England was thinner than usual, though still addressed to him, and in Will's now-familiar hand, and Bran's curiosity was sparked enough that he snuck off during lunch at the farm to open and read it. In contrast to Will's last missive, which had been five pages, back and front, it was quite short, and read:

“Dear Bran,

If you can come to London the second weekend in March, there will be something there to show to you. Can you get away for a few days?

Will”

Bran whistled between his teeth. Bloody wizard and his tight-mouthedness, he couldn't have given Bran anything more to go on than that? Well. 

He turned the thing over in his head through the afternoon. If there was something Will thought he ought to see, Bran thought it was likely worth the bother of pursuing it. Whatever it was, it would be interesting, at least, and at most it could be vital. Bran had more information than he had six months before, by a great order of magnitude, but Will was still the only one who properly remembered the things that they had done, the person Bran had been. Every piece he had received was precious to him. What would he not do, for promise of more?

And then, there was also that question of kissing – worth being raised, that.

His da groused over dinner when he'd pitched the request. “A lot to do, the second week in March. You think you can come and go as you please, boyo?”

“I should be back before the lambs, with plenty of time to spare. If you like, I'll see if I can't strike a bargain with one of the lads from Tywyn, send someone up for a replacement pair of hands – but da, I'm owed a bit of time, I think. Am I not?”

“But you're not leaving for good?” his father said, unexpectedly heavily.

“Da, it's just a couple of days I'm talking about, to see my friend.”

“No, Bran,” Owen said with a sigh and a shake of his greying head. “It will be more than that, in the end. You know it as well as I. Yet, we will manage. Perhaps it's time for David Evans to look into hiring on another full-time hand. Yes. I will raise it with him.”

“I'm not likely to hang about in London, of all places,” Bran assured his father. But guilt hung in his throat and stomach after that, and he did not make much headway through the rest of his meal. Yet, it's not right, he thought in silent internal rebellion. I cannot always be bound here, away up in these lonely valleys. I have stayed with him as long as I could.

He wrote back to Will: 

“Dear Will,

I can come on the 16th. I'm not going to buy the ticket until you tell me you can meet me at the station, though. Next time, you daft bugger, be pleased to tell me what it's all about before you tell me to hop a train, if it's all the same to you.”

In a few days, he had a reply, another light envelope containing a funny, Will-typical apology; Bran was beginning to understand that there would always be sideways reasons and other considerations, with that one. 

“Dear Bran,” it read: 

“I am sorry for backsliding into secrecy. Can you forgive me? I was excited by the opportunity that suddenly arose, to give you back a piece of what you have lost. I will not be more specific than that, not until you see – what I have to show you. I want to make sure, well, I don't want you to be disappointed. Thank you for coming all the same, and taking me on faith. I think Barbara might come down from Oxford to meet us. She likes you a lot, you know. So we can split a room in town. A three-way split will keep the cost to you down pretty well. A night or two in London? Come on the morning train. We will meet you at Euston station mid-afternoon, and then – on to Soho. Write me your time, when you've got your ticket.”

At the end of the letter, a sentence stood alone before the signature: “It will be good to see you again face to face. Yours, Will.”

Before he went out for work, Bran phoned down to Tywyn for his ticket for 16th March. A little under a month, it was, till then. He was excited enough, he knew, that the time would pass but slowly. The barking of the dogs echoed around the empty peaks of the mountains, when he made his way to the high pasture, and a kestrel curvetted in the wind along the ridge.

 

Traveling to London was a more straightforward affair than the trip to Buckinghamshire had been; his ticket would take him direct from Tywyn to the English capital all in one jaunt, without transfers. Hitching a ride into Tywyn with Rhys Evans, and then boarding his train to the south and the east, Bran was pleased with himself – and then, rather mockingly self-aware – as he found the course of the journey both familiar and comfortable, well-known to him after his recent travel. 

The benevolent, pleasurable feeling he had of surveying _his land_ , always felt by him in passing through the green lands of Wales, lingered in his heart even after the train had crossed over into England. It was not that he felt any so different about the English; he knew his history too well for that. But there was what he had learned of his bloodline: the great father, the fey mother, the story of England and Wales and other modern nations besides.

Or perhaps it was because the Stantons were home there. He had come to see them very much as his own family, and that gave him grounds for belonging. He was looking forward to hearing their news. 

He did not feel much self-conscious about his freakish looks, at all, during the course of the journey and he left his knit cap in his bag when he deboarded at Euston Station. The sun was hidden behind warm grey clouds, so he similarly left the dark glasses in his shirt pocket, ready to hand if he needed them.

As he exited the building and stretched barefaced and bareheaded in the cool air, he heard his name. “Hi, Bran! Bran Davies!” A male voice, the name pronounced correctly but with an English accent.

Wheeling, he came face to face with Will Stanton, standing by the war memorial across the roundabout. He was wearing a faded blue jacket, Bran saw. His head was also bare. His hair, trimmed more neatly than it had been, still hung in a longish fringe around his face. The face was less gaunt than it had been when last they'd met, but still showed more than naturally winter-pale. 

Smiling, Bran waved, and went to him.

“Hullo there,” he said. “I'm glad to find you on your feet, this time. And not so wet.”

Will smiled, evidently taking the jibe in good humor. “I do try,” he said. 

As Bran came up to a halt beside Will, he felt the world turning. Will was raising an arm, seeming to reach for – a handclasp? An embrace?

But Bran did not have to find out, then, how far he was willing to take the heady pull of intimacy that stretched between them, because Barbara came bouncing up from the courtyard, tugging another woman behind her by the hand.

“You made it!” she said to Bran. “I'm amazed that we did.” Her companion was of indeterminate middle-young age, mid-dark complexion, and considerable height. Both women were bundled against the brisk air of the day in wool peacoats and scarves, and the unfamiliar woman's close-braided head was partially covered with a beret. 

Barbara introduced them. “Bran Davies, Susannah Cole.”

“Her _girlfriend_ ,” Will put in, with brotherly over-emphasis.

“Her girlfriend,” Susannah confirmed, extending the hand not intertwined with Barbara's to greet Bran with a brief, firm grip. “Also we're in school together. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh,” Bran said, raising an eyebrow. “Well then. Likewise.”

“It's not much of a secret anymore,” Barbara said. “We stopped over at home yesterday. Partly to collect Will, and partly to introduce mum and dad to the whole thing, and introduce them to Sue. I was so worried it'd be a mess.”

“I think it went pretty well,” Susannah demurred.

“It went smashingly,” Will assured her. “Dad thinks you're absolutely brilliant.”

“It's not as simple as all that, Will,” Barbara said with a big-sisterly sigh.

“No, I know,” Will said. “But all the same, you know they'd never want us to ever try to be something other than what we are, not really.”

“You include yourself in that, baby brother?” Barbara tossed her curly hair, standing with one hip cocked and looking down her nose at the two of them, Will and Bran, still standing within touching distance but separated by inches of empty air. “Let's see you do as I've done, instead of lurking off like usual.”

“Oh, well,” Will said, and swallowed hard.

“Hah!” Bran punched him in the arm, and then grappled him into an arm bar to ruffle his hair. Releasing Will with a grin, he said, “It is good to see you, both of you.” 

He added to Susannah, “I got to know the Stantons over the holiday. I think they're tops. I'm sure they'll be thoroughly decent about just about everything. Barbara told me about you, then, but she didn't say that she was angling for a romance.”

“It's still a bit new,” Susannah said. “But I agree they're lovely people.”

“Bran's an old friend of mine,” Will told Susannah. “We've only recently reconnected, as adults. He lives in the Welsh mountains. You wouldn't believe the natural beauty up there.”

“I would, I've been up there myself, hiking.”

“How are doing, Bran?” Will asked. “Was the trip all right? Are you hungry?”

“Not starving, but I could eat,” Bran answered. “I'd like a walk, I think.”

“Good,” Will said, and smiled at him. “We've got about a mile to go to Soho.”

They set off, walking out four-square to join the flow of the city streets. As they threaded a zigzag course southward, Bran saw the silver and marble façades, and thought of the many human hands that had worked on them over centuries of time. There they stood, piled the one era on top of the other until an edifice to human industry was piecemeal formed, greater in the sprawling sum of its parts than any individual endeavor. It was a far more metropolitan scene than any he'd encountered in a good while, and he was alive to the sense of time moving in a great current around him, present creatures moving over the bones of ages. 

“Did you know,” Will said, as they made their way down a few blocks of Tottenham Court Road, “that the name 'Soho' is supposedly based on the sound of a hunting horn? Henry VIII used it as a hunting preserve.”

“Tally ho, what!” Barbara laughed, arm in arm with Susannah.

“What time is the opening tonight, Will?” Susannah asked.

“Starts at 7. We can either stop for something to eat, or check into our room first. The exhibition's right around the corner from the room – I think it's a student building – so that'll be convenient. Two beds,” he added.

Barbara smirked at him; Bran was fascinated to see a blush rising up the side of Will's throat. “Who's supposed to be chaperoning who, exactly?”

“Chaperone yourself,” Will retorted. “You're the elder, here.”

Bran thought, watching him, we both know that that's not really true, he and I.

But he did not say anything of it, walking along there beside Will, feeling his footsteps ringing against the stone and concrete beneath them. He changed the subject instead. 

“We seem to be the only adults here, Susannah. So. Do you know anything about this mysterious thing we're going to see?”

“Will only told me that it was an exhibition of an illustrator's work,” she said. She had a lovely, melodious voice, such that it Bran found it no great chore to listen to her speak. “I don't know a lot more than that. Honestly, I was pretty focused on getting through coming out to Barbara's family. Without that weight, I feel so light I think I could fly.”

“Don't fly away to Neverland just yet,” Barbara put in. “We like you just where you are.”

“All right, Bran?” Will asked him.

“Yeah, I'm good. Like Barbara said, tally-ho. I don't think I expected an art exhibition, though.”

“It's like I wrote you,” Will said, rather shyly. “There's something there you need to see.” He added, “This is the only way I've been able to think of, to make things up to you, and give you back some of what you lost.” But, with both Barbara and Susannah looking more than comfortably interested in this admission, Will went quiet, and resolutely said no more about it.


	5. Chapter 5

They only made it a few blocks along their way before being tempted by wafting smells of curry spice and frying grease. 

The pub was moderately busy, but not over-loud. Comfortably ensconced in a dark corner booth, Bran asked over their first round of pints, “How are you doing, then, Will? No ill health, after the river?”

“No, thanks,” Will answered. “Mum's watching me like a hawk, though. Part of me feels a bit cooped up, and wants to be let to go home to the manor and be left alone; but not all of me, and maybe I've been the better for being back with Mum and Dad. A person can't be lonely, there.”

“I could see that,” Bran said. “And I think you are right, that it is not good to be too lonely. I have struggled with that, myself.”

“He's exaggerating his wellness a little,” Barbara put in with a sidelong long. “I saw how out of breath you were when we sat down, baby brother.”

Will made a negating gesture with one hand. “It's nothing,” he said. “Anyway, it will pass. It's better than it was.”

“We don't have far to go, from here,” Susannah said. “Less than a mile. I've stayed in this lodging-house before, when I needed to come down and catch a show.”

Their order of chips and curry arrived then, and everyone was momentarily distracted by gustatory zeal.

“Are you in show business, then?” Bran asked Susannah, when they had each taken the edge off of their appetites.

“Sort of. I'm doing graduate study in dramaturgy. Stage history and theory.”

“I can see how that would be very interesting,” Bran said. “There can be a lot of power in an impression.” As he, with his unusual looks, had good cause to know.

“If people are going to be looking,” Susannah said, with the familiar tone of a person who attracted unwanted attention, “you may as well do something with it.” 

They shared a smile.

“Susannah and Will, the historians in my life,” Barbara said teasingly, gesturing to her girlfriend and brother with an inclusive gesture, as if catching them both up in the loop of a lasso. “Will's dustier than Susannah, though, I give you fair warning,” she added pointedly to Bran.

“Got his head in the past, that one does,” Bran said, maintaining the light tone. “He didn't spend enough time in Wales, I guess. The old ways are still close to living memory, up there in the hills where I grew up, and there's not much chance for dust to settle. But then, perhaps memory is all the chance there is, there.”

“You had hoped, once,” Will said, in a quiet, solemn tone that made Bran think that one of the _forgotten_ things was being mentioned, a thing that he had said that he could not remember saying, “that there would be a new chance for your valleys, moving into the future.”

“We hope for many things, when we are young.”

“Are you so cynical, now?”

Bran paused, giving the question more serious consideration. Will was right to call him on the cynicism; borrowed from the men of the mountains, it did not sit evenly on his shoulders.

“The food is better here, at any rate,” he dodged, buying time to think. 

“True enough!” said Barbara with a laugh. “I'll say the same, myself. Farm-fresh is lovely in its way, but I'd rather eat in London any day. Even Oxford pubs are better about using spices than we traditional English-raised cooks manage.”

Bran said at last, returning to the gnawed bone of the point, “It is not that I have not got hope. It is more that I do not see, clearly, how things are to be worked out. It is hard to get transportation up through the mountains, very hard in bad weather, and the only people who come anymore are the tourists. A lovely time they have of it, but it makes for strange living for the locals, for everything is pitched to the visitors and priced out of the farmers' reach, most of them. I do not see how it will not just be more visitors, and farmers that can't afford to leave, the each to torment the other in the end.”

“I met with some nasty language, when I was there, from people who are not used to anyone who does not look like them,” Susannah said. “It's a shame; they're as much a former subject of British empire as the rest of us, if we could only work together.”

“Human beings have always grouped, and splintered,” Will said, using the gentle, reflective tone that Bran was coming to think of as his 'Sadder and Wiser Watchman of the Light' voice. “If anything, even more here than elsewhere in the world, what with all the factionalism and bloodshed we've had in the British Isles over the centuries. All the way back to the Romans, and before.”

“Human nature it may be,” Bran answered, speaking fiercely, “but people will respond to an observer, a judge, or a hand held in command. Turn those powers to the people's ends, and you might have something.”

“You're not suggestion a return to monarchism or anything like that?” Barbara put in.

“No, I am not,” Bran said. “Democracy prevents the instability of hereditary power, and that, I think, is a very good thing. No running about panicking about the legitimacy of the king's sons, or collapses of government when the king dies without issue. It is more that I am saying the government should lead from a place of strength, once the will of the people has constituted it.”

Will smiled, then, and said, “You must not be best pleased with Downing Street.”

“No more I am,” he said, grinning in return. “But I wager you that if I raised my voice to shout 'down with Downing Street' I'd have the agreement of every curmudgeon here, until they started to worry that I was a young radical and made movements to disavow me. Nothing special in it.”

When they were well-fed and suitably cheery, they all four bundled back up in scarves and jackets, and resumed their various burdens of shoulder-bags, duffels and backpacks.

They walked down into Soho on smaller roads, with smooth modern pavements, not historic cobblestones, passing under their feet. When they came to their lodging-house on Dean Street, Susannah greeted the man in the front hall with a familiar smile. The keys he gave them opened the door to a small upstairs room, with windows overlooking the street and a pair of double beds covered with bright crocheted afghans and patchwork quilts. 

For a natural interval they dispersed their things and adjusted their clothing for the evening.

“Tell us a little about what we're going to see, Will?” Barbara asked, fiddling with her hair in the front mirror.

“Max was the one who told me about the show, actually. Not on purpose – he was talking about some publishing expo he'd been to where he'd seen this artist's stuff, and found out that he was going to have a solo in London this month. Max said he was transitioning from more highbrow abstract stuff, and thinking about trying to get into illustration. Hence, why he was talking to Max. You probably won't have heard of him, though, he's younger than all of us. English. His name is Barnabas Drew.”

“Sounds interesting,” Bran said, still not having an idea what it was all about. He'd changed into a dark navy turtleneck all the same, and let his trousers hang over the shower bar for a few minutes to steam the wrinkles of the day out of them.

The sun was setting by the time they re-emerged, the clouds in the sky breaking up, catching the rose and gold characteristics of the light on their separating sides.

Will took point this time, Bran walking beside him and Barbara and Susannah coming behind. It was the closest to a moment alone they'd had together.

“I'm excited for you to see this,” Will said. The open, simple happiness of his expression in the fading daylight was breath-catching. Bran smiled back.

They didn't have far to go. Ahead of them, a door to another small three-story building was left open, a pasteboard sign propped up in front; and from inside light and music issued, yellow and echoing with New Wave reverb.

They headed up two flights of stairs, emerging into a suite of rooms with white walls, wood floors, spot lighting, and clustered people, many of whom were brightly dressed and styled. Wine was being poured from a card table in one corner. On the walls hung an array of framed pieces in several mediums.

One grouping, done in gentle daubs of gouache and watercolor, depicted pseudo-folkloric figures; similar to nudes in the realist tradition, the male and female-seeming shapes had added curves and spurs that suggested wings or horns, hooves or tails. Some appeared benign, some malignant, and all were somehow strange.

On another wall, shadow boxes with wood, stone, and painted metal hung like totems. Bran stood for a long time before one, from which a long, lolling red tongue seemed to hang, threatening and hungry.

People were milling about the apartment; the show was well-attended, for something so out-of-the way. Coming up beside him, Will handed him a plastic glass of red wine and drew him away from where the girls were checking out a series of abstracts apparently meant to evoke earth-goddess iconography. “Come with me,” Will said. “These aren't what I wanted to show you.” 

Bran followed him through the second room of the exhibition, and into the third. They passed a knot of people clustered around a fair-haired young man, who appeared to be giving a lecture.

On the back wall of the third room, a set of long, large, vividly-colored oil paintings hung in sequence. With heavy dark lines and rather abstracted Celtic design elements, they were as radiant as stained glass.

A man crowned with a kingly circlet of gold stood at the prow of a graceful sailing ship, the sunrise breaking at the horizon, surrounded by a court of fantastical beasts: salmon, owl, lion, unicorn, stag, and dragon. A young man with pale fair hair, his face obscured by the flat of a glowing silver-blue sword blade, a great spreading tree looming dark in the background, was surrounded by a border of Celtic-knotwork hunting hounds. A small, birdlike lady with a great rosy ring on her finger stood on a green hill framed by stylized roses. A cloaked man with a hawklike profile stood against a cloud-chased sky, and around him were the peaks of grey stone mountains' teeth.

On the pasteboard card beside them, Bran read, “This series, titled 'The Matter of Britain,' explores iconography from British mythologies with a contemporary realist eye. The contrastive traditional design elements in the pieces call attention to the ongoing construction of British identity via cultural touchstone myths like the stories of King Arthur and the Faerie Queene. Oil on canvas.”

Even without Will, now silent and still and almost vibrating with intensity beside him, having directed Bran's attention to these particular paintings, Bran knew he would have come to stand in this place in the exhibition and in no other. Deep within him, a note was striking, the sound radiating out from his core, transforming what it touched. 

He was pretty sure what it was that he was seeing. But he wanted Will to say it. 

“So. What am I looking at, here?” He pitched his voice low and intimate, encouraging confession. Tell me the truth, he wanted to urge.

Will smiled at him, and obliged. “The artist was involved in our quest, when we were all young,” he said. “All three of the Drew siblings were. Barney had a previous interest in King Arthur stories, so he was fascinated by you. The others were more prickly. They were all made to forget, same as you,” he added. He seemed almost happy to be speaking openly of it. “Barney, who always had gifted Sight, seems to have held onto a more than few images. Likely, he thinks he has made them up, or dreamed them. He does not know that he is painting from memory.”

“That is my father, then?”

“Yes. And – yourself, with the Sword of the Light. You were a very heroic boy, you know.”

“Who are the others?”

Will's smile faltered. “Two of my people,” he said. “The Old Ones. The Lady, and the Old One known in legend as Merlin. I knew him by a different name. He was my master, when I was learning to be what I am.”

“You told me they'd all left.”

“Yes. They left time, with the King your father.” With a sidelong look, Will said, “You had the choice to go with them, and not forget. You wanted to stay here, in this world. You said it was because you had 'loving bonds' to hold you here.”

Bran swallowed heavily. From the wall, his great father beamed down on him with a gentle grace. “I wish that you had not broken the bond between us, then. We ought to have stayed close, Will, grown up together. What use was my staying, if you were going to leave me without any real memory of you? For years, you were just some kid, in my mind, some kid who had been visiting around the farm once or twice, but nothing important. Not someone I needed to work to stay in touch with. I would have, if I had known.”

“I couldn't tell you,” Will said miserably. “You had chosen to forget; it would have been wrong to undo what Merriman had done.”

“I don't mean – not if I had known about my true father, the King's name and the destiny and all that. I mean, if I had known how important we had been to one another. If I had known how much you had been my friend. I would have come after you, if I had known.”

It was Will's turn to swallow heavily. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see that now. I was wrong to separate myself from you so completely. I owed you better than that.”

“I understand why you didn't,” Bran said, uncomfortable with the degree of self-condemnation in Will's voice. He nudged the edge of Will's trainer with his own foot. “Water over the dam it is now. I've got you back again, and mean to keep you this time.”

Their eyes met and held, the warmth between them kindling into heat as time seemed to slow around and about them. There was nothing, for once, to intrude between them. Will had surrendered his secrets. Bran had no need to extort or pressure in order to get them, but could give understanding and acceptance instead. There were, for once, no family members about to make things awkward; and, in Soho, who would pay mind to two young male lovers? The loosening of constraints was a slow, pleasurable release, the growing sense of intimacy between them exciting but also deeply comfortable, a favorite joy re-discovered and found to still be vital.

Will smiled and blushed a little – or maybe it was the wine – and, shifting his weight to move into Bran's physical space, as he'd been invited to, looked like he was going to say something. But – 

“Excuse me,” a tall man said, interrupting the moment, “I was wondering, have we met before? I'm Simon Drew, brother of the artist. You look very familiar, but I can't think why.”

“Bran Davies and Will Stanton. No, I don't think we've had the pleasure,” Bran said. Will gave his head a little shake, as if to say, _no, no you haven't_ , or maybe _don't let on, please don't_. But he did not move away from Bran's side, when Bran gave their names together, and Bran counted that among his victories.

“Well,” the interloper said awkwardly, “Sorry about that, then. I hope you've been enjoying the show. Would you like me to introduce you to my brother? He was speaking to some people, but it looks like they're on their way out.”

“Yes, all right,” Will said.

They were shepherded over to where the fair-haired young man was taking the opportunity of investigating the refreshment table. “Hi, Barney,” Simon said, “meet Bran Davies and Will Stanton. They were admiring the King Arthur paintings. Ever since Barney was little,” Simon said, preening a little bit with the importance of speaking so intimately of the artist to his public, “he was just obsessed with King Arthur.”

“Nice to meet you,” Bran said, shaking the blond boy's hand.

“We heard about your show from my brother Max, Max Stanton,” Will said. “He mentioned you were looking into illustration. He works in publishing. I have to say, I think you'd do a fantastic illustrated edition of 'King Arthur and His Knights,' or even an original Arthurian series. I should say we're about due for an update.”

“Isn't that a thought?” Barney said. “I've done some illustration work before, but never on such a high-profile a subject. It's a thing to take on – everyone will compare you to Rackham, and find you wanting.”

“I thought the four paintings you have here were very fine,” Bran put in. “Not like Rackham. More modern.”

Barbara and Susannah came over to refill their wine glasses with water, and Will waved them over. “Barbara Stanton, Susannah Cole, Barney and Simon Drew,” he said, indicating the relevant parties.

“Nice to meet you,” Barney said, his bright young-professional's smile beaming as he went for another round of shaking hands. “I'll look up your brother's card in my Rolodex,” he said to Will. “Stanton, was it? Max? You might have something, about that idea of an illustrated Arthur.”

A large group came in at the front of the show, and Barney, with Simon hovering behind him like a hen with a single chick, made his excuses and went on to continue to greet his public.

“This has been interesting, Will,” Susannah said. “I like Drew's stuff. It's a little ethnocentric, but at least it's honest about it.”

Barbara asked, “I'm not hungry yet, is anyone else?” Susannah, Will, and Bran all shook their heads. “It's only quarter to eight, a little early to go out.”

“She loves the nightlife,” Susannah said, with an affectionate roll of her eyes.

“Hush, you!” her girlfriend said, “We can't spend the weekend in Soho and not go out at all. What kind of an example would we be sending for younger degenerates?”

As the others disposed of cups and bundled into outerwear, Bran glanced back down the apartment to where he could see a sliver of the King Arthur paintings at the end of the hall. The craggy face of Will's master looked back at him; he shifted, and it was his father's face that he could see, framed in the narrow slice of the painting that was not hidden from view.

When at last he tore his gaze away, it was to find Will, jacket zipped and scarf on, watching him with expressive eyes. Feeling exposed and sensitive, Bran turned to button up his own coat.

Making his way down the stairs and out to the street, he felt the fingers of Will's bare hand brush against his wrist. For the space of a few steps, he reached out and grasped the hand, intertwining it with his own.


	6. Chapter 6

Above them, the stars twinkled in the cloudless blue of evening as the sky darkened toward night. Will quietly withdrew his hand from Bran's as they grouped up with Barbara and Susannah on the corner under a streetligh, his native reticence apparently re-asserting itself around the others. It was all right; Bran would have plenty more opportunities to get under that skin.

“Are you lot up for a walk?” Susannah asked. “It's cool, but not cold. After the winter, I'm always eager to be out-of-doors again.”

“We could go to St. James' Park,” Barbara offered.

Bran laughed, and was shaken out of the waking dream that had held him suspended since Will had guided him to stand before the painting of his father's face, brought back to present reality. “Downing Street? Really? What was it we said? Now you want to go play tourist in the palace park?”

“Well, why not?” Barbara said. “We'll just get drunker, otherwise. Which I've no objection to as such, but Sue's right that it's early, and if we want to manage to stay up to go out I think I, at least, had better take a break from the wine. It's awful, not being a teenager. Falling asleep becomes a constant hazard.”

“Besides, you lot _are_ tourists,” Susannah said. “So you needn't be snobby.”

“Fair enough,” Bran agreed with a flashing grin. “Well then. We'll go and gawp at the seat of modern empire. If Will has no objection?”

“Down by the water?” Will's voice was somewhat abstracted, as if he was thinking of something else. But – “It shouldn't be a problem,” he said. 

Barbara asked, “You're not feeling too tired?”

“A walk sounds nice,” Will replied, shaking his shaggy head and seeming to wake back up, too. “I've got a good jacket, and the wine we had will keep me warm for a bit. You don't need to hover, Bar. I'm all right, really.”

“You should have gloves on, baby brother. It's getting nicer, but it's not summer yet.”

Obediently, Will took his wool gloves out of his coat pocket and put them on. He made a face in Bran's direction. “I'm amazed she's letting me out after dark,” he said. “Mother hen.”

“You scared us, last fall. And getting fussed over is one of the ways you know you're loved. Hush and let yourself be _loved,_ Will.”

Susannah linked Barbara's arm with hers. “You haven't had enough alcohol for this level of declamation, Bar,” she said. “Wait until after shots.”

It wasn't until they moved off down the street that Will's now-gloved hand reached back out, similarly looping his arm through Bran's in the sheltering dark. It did not last, withdrawn again as the group walked closer together as they neared the hub of Picadilly Circus and the level of traffic increased, but Bran still felt a pleasant buzz of personal anticipation activating his body and emotions even after Will let go.

The city looked very grand in the oncoming night, elegant Georgian structures rising glittering into the twilight. At the Shaftesbury Fountain, a little crowd of people sat waiting for a bus or just enjoying the night; a smell of marijuana drifted up from one corner, the source not immediately apparent, mingling with the smells of street food, and other human odors. At the corners, indigent people sat with signs asking for help; the flip side of the economics that had piled together enough wealth to build those glittering estates and monuments to human power. 

“Sorry,” Susannah said tersely as they continued by without lingering, turning down Wardour Street to wind their way through Haymarket, and always heading downhill to where the Duke of York Column stood sentry over Waterloo Place, sandwiched between the terraces and the tree-lined squares at the meeting of Regent Street and The Mall.

“It is beautiful, in its own way,” Bran said as they paused at the top of the wide white stairs by the monument. In front on them, the Horse Guards Parade extended. “All of it, this great pile of stone and metal and power. Not beautiful like a mountain, or a forest, but as a thing that has been built.”

Will and Barbara spoke over each other; “The things of men often are,” Will said, and, “A bit phallic,” Barbara judged, her head to one side. The juxtaposition got guffaws of laughter all around. Will gave his sister a little punch on her shoulder. “Ha very ha,” he said, happy and childish, and it made Bran catch fire inside just watching him.

“Do you know that there are stairs inside the monument, that you can climb up?” Will said, when he'd recovered breath. “They've been closed to the public for ages, though, on account of being delicate.”

“ _Anxious,_ even ...” Barbara insinuated, giving in to another round of snickers.

“It is beautiful – and phallic,” Susannah agreed. “That goes with the power, even for the ruling queens. They changed this land a lot, over the centuries. Built a leper hospital in the swamp, drained the swamp and closed the hospital for the royal exotic animal menagerie – can you imagine the animal cruelty? – and then by the Restoration you've got Nell Gwynne swanning about the place. They kept pigs here, once, when the swamp was still intact.”

“Henry VIII to thank for kicking off the changes, yet again,” Will said.

“That's where you're wrong, bucko,” Bran threw in, shooting Will a teasing smile that was meant to dazzle. “Never expect a Welshman to thank a Tudor for anything.”

“Well,” Will said, “I expect the swamp was rather bothered about being drained, too. Can't imagine thanks were on the table.”

It was a rather weak joke; but the intimacy, the camaraderie and conversation with Will felt so whole-body _good_ to him that Bran couldn't find it in himself to care. 

As Barbara and Susannah started off down the steps, Bran caught Will back for a moment. Hidden behind the curve of the monument, he brought his thumb up to trace the shape of Will's cheek. 

Will closed his eyes, just for a moment, and swallowed hard. “Bran ...”

“Beautiful, you are, too,” Bran told him. “More beautiful than the architecture by far. We'll see from phallic later.”

Will's eyes opened, and he laughed. “I am gratified you think so,” he said. “I am nothing memorable. I do not rate next to you at all.”

“Your people tried to make me forget you,” Bran said, “and yet they could not. You sell yourself short.”

“We should catch the others up, before they get too suspicious.”

“What, you think they don't know?”

“It's one thing to have them know,” Will said, “and it's another thing to hear about it without end. She'll be on my side, if I don't inconvenience her, but keeping her waiting and worrying will be a black mark against me. I want us to keep all of our allies. Come on!”

They careened down the three flights of steps as rapidly as was possible without mishap, finding Barbara and Susannah waiting for them at the bottom to cross over into the park. Well, Bran thought with an internal wince, he'd make it up, one way or another. 

They received nothing worse, for the moment, than a raised eyebrow from Barbara, an eyeroll of big-sisterly solidarity from Susannah.

The park opened up to envelop them as soon as they crossed over into its confines. The quality of the air became softer and more earthy, the city noises muffled by water and bare velvet turf. Barbara took a big, happy breath and let it out in an audible sigh. Beside him, Bran noticed, Will did not seem so relaxed; and he wondered why. As they walked down the park path toward the lake, he realized what Will had sensed sooner.

Some distance ahead of them, on a wooden bench by the curve of the water's edge, two women were sitting together, the edges of their finely-cut evening jackets and long skirts trailing in the weeds and wildflowers. A few steps closer, perspective on the women shifting to reveal their fronts and faces, and with a start and a shock Bran recognized one of them as Tamesis, the spirit of the Thames. She was clad in contemporary couture, a sharp taupe suit-coat with a plunging neckline and oversized buttons over a sparkling skirt or gown, dark hair slicked back so that it appeared to be shining-wet.

Bran glanced quickly at Will, and saw that Will was well aware of his former captor's presence, and did not seem to be at all surprised. Bran raised a questioning eyebrow, and received a shoulder-squeeze in return; what _that_ was to mean, he was not best sure. Bloody wizard. But it seemed to be all right, and so Bran did not raise a fuss, or otherwise alert Barbara and Susannah to the presence of the goddess, but continued on down the path.

As they came nearer, he began to hear what Tamesis was saying to her companion. “... have to be dealt with, one way or another,” she was saying. “See to it. You have my permission to use what resources are necessary. Only keep it covered over.”

“I am trying,” the other woman said in pleading tones. “There is so much of it to be dealt with.”

“Your problem, not mine.” 

Bran could see it, as she became aware of them; and then she turned her slick-haired head just a little, and smirked at him – or was it at Will? Bran clutched Will's arm possessively – with only a corner of her perfectly made-up mouth. She did not otherwise acknowledge them, and Barbara led the way down the opposite fork in the path, down the curve of the lake toward Downing Street.

“Look,” Barbara said, pointing “there's a pelican.”

“They were big in medieval theology, you know,” Will said, his voice gone bloodless and abstracted in the way it did, Bran had begun to learn, when he was scheming underneath. “This rather unique Christ metaphor – the pelican kills its young, but then revives them with its own blood. Which is complete nonsense as natural history, of course, but it does give you some insight into how their culture conceptualized things like death and resurrection.”

“I don't know if that had anything to do with why they imported them here,” Susannah said. “I think it was during the Restoration, that they set the pelicans loose in St. James's Park. I could be wrong, though.”

Will's voice was almost aggressively casual. “I say, Bar, would it be all right if I let you lot admire the wildlife, and doubled back to look at the plaques on those memorials we passed? You know I like that sort of thing. I wouldn't want to make you stand around while I poke around about installation details and whatnot. I'll double back and catch you up, if you promise not to go too far. Or we could meet back up at Duck Cottage?” 

“Yeah, all right.” Barbara did not seem to have caught anything amiss.

Attempting equal nonchalance, Bran said, “I'll go with you, shall I? Safety in numbers. You ladies all right without an escort for twenty minutes or so?”

Barbara smiled archly at that. She thought they were hanging back to make out. Well, Bran wasn't going to correct her, even though he didn't think going back to where the river waited would be nearly as fun as what she had in mind. He wasn't going to let Will face her alone, though, and for some reason he couldn't fathom, Will was making excuses to go back to where she sat with her underling.

“I think we'll manage,” Barbara said. “See you two at Duck Cottage. Have fun with the war memorial plaques, Will.”

As soon as they were out of earshot, Bran hissed, “Why are we going back? Do you _want_ to get frozen in a bog for another few months? Do you have any idea what your parents would go through?”

“She's not our enemy,” Will replied as they walked. “And that's a good thing. I mean to keep it that way. For one, the Thames is a great power, in this part of the world, and it is better by far to be on her good side. As much as she has one. For another – it was not her fault that there was a – technicality, or a loophole, in the ancient rules in my case. Her detention of me was lawful. Besides,” he added, “you made promises to her, in exchange for my liberty. That's the most important point. The more we can set the terms, there, the better outcomes are likely to be. Politeness goes a long way, my lord.” He smiled. “With power, comes cause for the exercise of charm.”

“You knew she was going to be here, didn't you? That's why you hesitated, and then said you thought it should be all right, when Barbara suggested this park.”

“I've lived all my life in the Thames River Valley, Bran. I know when I'm getting close to the river. The Thames and the Tyburn used to empty into the marsh, here, before the English Kings had it drained. Susannah was telling us about it.”

“You might have warned me.”

“Sorry, I did try to.”

Bran thought back over what Will had said. “Yes, all right,” he had to agree. Will _had_ tried; Bran had just been so very distracted. 

He could not afford a similar lack of focus now. They had nearly reached the bench where the river – the rivers? – sat, and soon Tamesis must become aware of them again. As of yet she had given no indication that she knew of their renewed approach.

“... want you to know that I do appreciate your time,” the other woman seated beside Tamesis was saying to her, as they drew close enough to hear her once more. “It is good, very good, to be able to act with the weight of the collective. How difficult it would be, to be solitary, isolate, in these matters! I cannot imagine –”

“That's enough, Tyburn,” Tamesis snapped. “Honey-tonguing me won't get you off the hook for your responsibilities.” Turning her shoulder to re-center her attention, dismissing Tyburn and pinning them, she smiled with veiled authority at Bran. 

“If it isn't Gwennie's boy, and his little wizard friend. So. Welcome to London, son of the Pendragon.”

“Tamesis,” he said.

“Greetings, lady,” Will said, sweeping a surprisingly graceful bow.

She laughed. “Pretty manners, little wizard. You will not shake my focus, however. I have given up what claim I had on you – and transferred it to _him._ You are brave, nephew, to come back into the influence of my watershed so soon. Unless – you mean to stay, here and now, and fulfill your obligation to me? No? I didn't think so.”

Bran flinched. She saw it, and laughed once more. “You have the proper degree of fear,” she said. “But because of the love I bore your mother, I will forbear my claim a short time yet. Do not think I have not forgotten what is owed me. Propose a way to settle your debt, Pendragon's-son. Or I will decide the payment, and it may not be as well to your liking.”

He did not flinch again; indeed, he feared her less than he had before. It was not her reference to the enforcement of their bargain that had caught his attention. “You loved my mother?” he said.

Her formidable features softened then into a sad, nostalgic smile. “Very much, when we were new together,” Tamesis lamented. “But it is long, now, since I was the merry river's daughter.”

Tyburn, beside her, echoed, “Once, I was the fairest scion of the Thames; but things change. Your mother, Pendragon's-son – she was lost entirely, lost to all of us. I was sorry for it.”

“Yes,” Bran said, his mouth dry. “Yes.” Then, thinking of the face he had _not_ seen in Barnabas Drew's paintings that evening, he dared to add, “Can you tell me what she was like?”

“She was like a fire on a mountaintop,” Tyburn said wistfully.

“She was like a lioncelle in a menagerie,” Tamesis said, harsh, almost croaking. “She let herself be tamed by a mortal man, and in the end, it was the end of her.”

“I think I understand. Thank you.” And now he, too, inclined his head in a gesture like a bow; not as deep as the obeisance Will had offered, yet. 

“A short time's grace I am granting you, Pendragon, no more. It is not advisable for you to test my patience in this matter. And you, little wizard – take care to keep your feet dry, lest you catch the cold.”

Will said nothing, but bowed very low, and began to back away. Taking the cue, Bran retreated from the deities as well. “Ladies, good evening,” he managed, and gave them another half-bow into the bargain. Will had said it would be a good idea to exercise some charm.

When they had once more gained the split in the path, Will let out a long breath. “Phew,” he said. “I think she likes you.”

“Excellent. The Thames likes me. Much good it may do me.”

“Better she like you than otherwise. You promised her _time_ , Bran, and that is something that I cannot help you with. I am sorry, you know, very sorry, that you've undertaken an obligation at all in my stead. If I'd been in my right self, I never should have let you do it.”

“It's all right,” Bran said, and meant it. Apart from his latent fears about his humanity, he did not feel at all crushed by the new responsibility that he had found with Will, the new names and old claims. Quite the opposite. He felt liberated by the correction of his formerly obliterated memory, and invigorated by the calls of legend, magic, and personal intrigue, that were coming to him thick and fast. He was rising on the rising tide, and ambition began to stir in him: to make of himself a personage worthy of his golden lineage. 

“I'm glad, at least,” Will said tentatively, “that they could share memories of your mother with you – memories I don't have, myself, to share. Barney didn't paint her. So I'm glad you had a chance to talk to them, tonight. And – if you have to come back to England, to satisfy your promise, maybe speaking with Tamesis about her will do something to make it worth your while.”

The phrase was provoking; and they were as alone as they had been all that day, walking side by side through the darkness. “I think,” Bran said, voice gone suddenly husky, “that I shall not find lack of that, no matter.”

Will stopped and turned to look at him. “Would you want to settle here? Could you ever be happy? Would you not miss the mountains, and your father, and Clwyd?”

“Here, maybe not,” Bran answered honestly. “The city … it is not that I have anything against it, as a way of living, but I do not think it is for me. Here, I might miss those things. But I will tell you, it has been in my thoughts this spring that I might like to leave the mountains, and my father, for a time. I've been dreaming away the seasons up there long enough.”

“If you could go anywhere,” Will asked, sounding too sad by half, “if there was no constraint – where would you go?”

“I don't know,” Bran answered, reflexive but still honest. He bit his lip, then elaborated, “Somehow, having all the choices open at once makes it hard to take any of them. Backwards, but there it is.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” Will said. “For a while, in my life, there was only the next task to hand, no room for any more than that. And now I am left alone to watch, and wait, for what or how long I do not know, and I … eternity is so very big, Bran.”

His face was very open, his voice low and soft, human and vulnerable. Bran leaned in, cupped his face again, and, holding him still, kissed him, gentle and chaste – at least at first.

Will froze for a second, then sighed and melted; hot and cold had nothing on Bran's wizard. But then his lips were parting slightly where they were pressed against Bran's, and Bran could feel the smooth wet warmth of the inner lip, taste the flavor of Will's mouth and find it good. Will made a muffled moaning noise and broke away, coming up for breath; breathing heavily himself, Bran leaned in and kissed him again, this time his tongue coming out to tease the kiss open a little further. Not all the way – not yet. He broke the kiss himself, leaving Will blinking, looking mussed and dazed.

“Next time,” Bran said, voice coming out deep and ragged, “you're going to have to kiss me. All right? Be brave enough to meet me in the middle, take what you want, if you want it.”

Will licked his lips, nodded his head, smiled a little. “I will,” he said. “Bran – if I have not said to you, as you have to me, that you are beautiful, you should know – it is not that you do not take away my every breath. You have always been breath-taking. But you were always uncomfortable, before, with any comment on it. I didn't want to cause distress.”

 

When they neared Duck Cottage, Susannah and Barbara came tumbling out toward the path from where they had evidently been enjoying themselves, making out by an ivy-covered lamp-post near a dormant rose garden.

“Enjoy yourselves?” Barbara asked them, raising an eyebrow. And of course, they had, in fact, just been doing pretty much exactly what they were suspected of, and so couldn't protest or defend themselves.

When no other recourse was possible, project and reverse. “Not half so much as you look to have been,” Bran returned, not letting her keep the conversational high ground. Susannah, standing with an arm slung around Barbara's shoulders, snickered into her free hand.

“Careful, Bar,” she said, still laughing. “Little brother's got an attack dog, now. No more freebies there!”

“Anyway,” Barbara shook free with a toss of her head, “it's getting late enough for a proper drink. And then I want to go dancing. Little brother,” she added, “may do as he pleases, and his little dog, too.”

It was Will's turn to snicker. As they trooped off again, broken more clearly into couples than they had been walking down, Bran found his mind returning to Will's question. If he was bound to the Thames for some amount of time, where was it that he would choose to be? With Will at his side, Will's sister chivvying them both with all the comfort and acceptance of family, the constraint of the river's binding seemed to be a potential blessing in disguise.

As for Tamesis herself, well – Bran turned back for a moment, as they passed by and out, to look at the place where the rivers had sat talking. No-one was there, now, and no-one else was apparent on the paths. Shaking his shoulders to loose his unease, he let the momentum of the others carry him on, back towards the lights and bustle of the metropole, the throb and beat of its human life.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note the upped rating -- it's starting to be earned, here. Other content notes at the end.

Barbara pulled them into the entry line at a club in the old theatre district on the far south end of Soho. 

“This is my favorite place to come by myself and dance, when Sue's too busy to go out with me,” Barbara told them happily, speaking loud to be heard over the throb of the bass as they went inside. “I know it's a bit girly, but – tough. We'll go to a men's gay bar next.”

The music was loud and up-beat, parti-colored lights changing over with the pounding rhythms. There were more women present than men, more same-sex couples than heterosexual ones, most fashionably dressed in a cross-section of punk and bohemian styles. Bran's unusual looks in no way stood out from this crowd. It was a young scene, and a cheerful one. 

“Nice and happy and safe,” Susannah said, grinning. A new track came on, and, grin stretching wider, she made her way to the center of the room, where lights were clustered around a raised dance floor.

The remainder of them bellied up to the bar and ordered a round of whiskey shots.

“Do you dance?” Barbara shouted into Bran's ear.

“Not really,” he admitted.

She grinned. “Will neither,” she said, holding up her shot to toast them. Setting down her glass and leaning over the bar again she ordered them another round, then grabbed Susannah's glass and bounced off to join her girl under the pulsing lights and spinning mirrors.

“She has a happy spirit, your sister,” Bran said, watching her go. “To Barbara, then.” The burn of the whiskey on its way down was sweet.

“You never used to like mirrors,” Will said after a moment, voice dreamy and slurring a little with intoxication after the second shot. “When we were boys. I felt that you needed to be protected from them. I couldn't, always. Bran.” He reached out, gripping Bran's wrist with a vise-like grip. “I do not know how to tell you, freely, what I feel. What I've felt. There is so much to say. It is too big for my mouth.” 

“You're thinking too much again,” Bran told him. “I can think of plenty of better things to do with your big mouth.” Was it the alcohol, making him pot-brave? Was that why they'd both had the two shots right in a row? He asked, “Wanna get out of here for a bit?”

Will looked at him, blinked slowly, looked over at the crowd that had swallowed Barbara, licked his lips. “All right, then,” he said.

Following the red glow of an exit sign, Bran pulled Will with him toward the back door, standing ajar to let in a draft of fresh air.

They were alone on the back stair, a single light illuminating the alley around them.

“My eyes are sensitive,” Bran admitted. “It's not too bad in there, but some environments are really distressing.”

“They're beautiful eyes,” Will said. “I'm sorry you've ever any pain from them. That's not at all what I was talking about.”

He sounded plaintive, almost petulant; illuminated in the lamplight, the spring stars fighting through the cool damp evening to shine briefly above them, he looked childlike, and ageless, and sweet. Bran threw one hand out to pin him against the brick outer wall of the club, the other coming up to cup Will's cheek, pulling him into position so that when Bran leaned in to kiss him he was sure to find his mark. 

“The discomfort is not so bad,” Bran said, his breath a little ragged as he moved in for the clinch. After a few moments of kissing Will with singular focus, he pulled back and said, “anyway, I know it is not. It's all right, I understood what you meant. I understand why you have't pressed me more. I know you feel the same thing I do, even if you're quiet and close-mouthed.”

“Good,” Will managed. Bran pressed little kisses down along his neck, and Will sighed and relaxed into Bran, going pliant. The forward momentum of the kissing accelerated rapidly then, Bran's spare hand moving from Will's shoulder to his waist to his ass, until he was practically lifting Will at the hips, holding him close and grinding against him at the same time.

“I mean to make you less quiet,” Bran murmured, dropping his voice to a deeper register. He nipped at Will's neck, eliciting a small yelp.

Will said, looking at Bran through his lashes, “What about keeping me open-mouthed?” Then he smiled and ducked, shifting their equilibrium so that he was no longer held, but instead had Bran pressed back against the brickwork. 

When Will dropped to his knees, Bran found himself hoping, in a stray and disconnected thought, that the ground beneath them was clean and clear. Will's fingers worked at the fly of his trousers. As Will succeeded in exposing Bran's extremely erect cock, Bran's last clear-minded cogitation was that it was a good thing, too, that no-one else was around, at least for the moment, because it just might be him that was going to have the problem with staying quiet.

Teasingly, Will licked the head of Bran's cock, warm and wet, long and slow. Bran gasped, his cock jerking up in Will's face. His consciousness contracted to the places where Will's saliva had left him cool and sensitized. Will blew a gentle exhale over him, and Bran shivered.

It had been a long time since he'd been touched like that. 

“Want to make you feel everything good, all the time, and nothing bad at all ever,” Will said, and then swallowed down his shaft, taking the whole of Bran's cock at a breath.

Will's mouth felt amazing on him, lips and tongue pressing and stroking in a sliding rhythm, the hot wet slide of Will's throat as smooth and soft as velvet against his throbbing erection. “You're amazing. Will … _fuck … ah!_ ” He leaned back against the wall as his knees went to jelly. 

He might have felt shamefaced at coming as easily as a teenager, if Will had not looked so ridiculously pleased with himself, sitting back and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the cat who had got the cream. 

“I've wanted to do that for _years_ ,” Will confessed. He pulled himself up from his knees and Bran tugged him back in to his embrace, the two of them leaning back against together against the firm support of the wall. Will's cock was hard, tenting his jeans, and Bran ground against him, swirling their hips like a dance move. 

“I can tell,” he said. “Did you practice on an entire men's chorus, or what?”

He reached down between them; it was his turn to struggle with the zipper on the other man's fly. 

“I'll admit to some youthful fooling with vegetables and ices and such – you know how country kids are, adolescent imaginations.” 

Will's breath jumped as Bran's hand found its way inside his briefs and fisted around his erection.

“I do, at that,” Bran said, enthusiastically going to work on finishing Will off, rubbing the head of his cock with a thumb as he squeezed and stroked the shaft. 

Will didn't last much longer than he had, coming with a stifled shout, messy and hot all over Bran's hand.

After a moment of quiet, their panting breaths mingling, Bran asked, “Did it live up to your imaginings?” He meant it to be swaggering; disconcertingly, it came out earnest.

Will smiled, open and happy in the aftermath of orgasm. “It's a good beginning,” he said.

Wiping his hands with a handkerchief that was knotted up and shoved back down into his pockets, Bran did up his trousers. Will did likewise.

After a stretch of recuperatory silence, Will added, “I'm clean. I know you were just joking, before, but just so you know – there haven't been many partners, for me.” Bran looked sideways at him; his voice sounded different, tighter, less happy. “And also it doesn't matter if you've got anything, because I'm not really human.” 

“If you haven't had lovers, it's not because of any lack of looks, or talents,” Bran said, honestly perturbed by that last. “I'm not surprised, though. Bet you rarely gave anyone the chance. I'm clean, too. Tested after my last partner. A few years ago, that was now. It would still matter, anyway. You should still take care of yourself, 'Old One of the Light' or not. What if you were still contagious? And I know you can get sick yourself, even if it mightn't kill you outright.”

“Yes,” Will said, but now he was noticeably withdrawn. “Sorry. I should have been more careful.”

A pair of girls came tumbling out the back door, kissing so furiously that they nearly went over the railing into the alley. Will looked up at them sharply, but they did not seem to have heard anything untoward.

“Ready to go back in?” Will said after a moment, faux-nonchalant. “I don't want to cause too much of a fuss if we're missed.”

“You spend too much time trying not to cause a fuss, you know that?” Bran grumbled, but then he said, “yes, all right, let's go,” and let Will lead him back to the lights and the music.

“I don't mind mirrors as much as I used to,” he said as they stood on the edge of the din. A reciprocal offering; he figured that personal truths were a good coin in love negotiations. He didn't want Will to feel more cast down than was deserved; he had meant to re-assert Will's rights and importance, to him and in general, and instead he feared he had come down too hard on a friend who was particularly vulnerable to even well-meaning criticism. “Mirrors used to frighten me. Now, I'm not afraid of my own face.” 

Will had sucked him off, and it had been incredible, and they were probably going to have sex again, and Bran was – really, really happy about it. He wanted Will to feel as happy as he did. He wanted to figure out how to break through the ice of Will's reserve, to make him always comfortable and secure.

It was what Will had said to him, on his knees in the lamplight: everything good, nothing bad, not ever. Well, so. It was mutual.

They got a carafe of water and a stack of cups at the bar, and taking a table by the dance floor decamped to re-hydrate. Susannah and Barbara emerged from the throng not long later, gratefully accepting water themselves. Their skin gleamed with sweat from the exercise at the warm press of the room.

“We've tortured the boys long enough, I think,” Barbara said. “Time to move on?”

“Let's head up a ways further into Soho,” Susannah suggested. “We should hit Old Compton Street for sure.”

“Good-oh,” Bran said, and went to settle the bill. “You can get the next one,” he told Barbara when she made to protest; he meant to mind Will's advice about keeping allies, and he was starting closest to hand.

They spilled out onto the street, headed north.

“Further up and further in,” said Will, gesticulating. “Tally ho.” He looked, and Bran felt, thoroughly intoxicated still, if not staggeringly tipsy.

The street was cobblestone and the ambiance was gay; neon lights and Chinese lanterns supplemented the streetlights, and music blared from the clubs. 

“Haven't been out like this since uni,” Bran said, leaning his head back and taking it all in.

“I like it a lot,” Barbara confessed. “I come down to London with Sue much oftener than I need to. It's a good change from books and exams and other students. I feel much better, after a weekend here.”

“What about you, Will?” Susannah asked.

Will shrugged, awkward and self-effacing. “I don't know,” he said. “It's always nice to see people relaxed and happy, being their real selves, I suppose.”

“You're supposed,” Bran said, punching his arm gently, “to relax and be happy yourself. Let yourself feel like you belong, for once.”

Will smiled; it was affectionate, and sad. “I'm not so good at that,” he said.

“Learn better,” Bran instructed; let me teach you, he thought. He would not have thought of it as something he was good at, once, but he'd had long years of practice by now figuring out how to get his shoulders down, even with his eyes and hair and skin always marking him out for notice.

They went in at the iconic sign of the Admiral Duncan, the old-fashioned and stolid exterior belying the vibrant scene hidden within the historic gay bar, and ordered a round of cocktails. 

A new song came on; slow bluesy notes sauntering vaguely downwards toward resolution. Following a quixotic impulse, Bran extended a hand to Will, and pulled him toward the corner of the floor where men were dancing together in couples.

He pulled Will close, the echo of their clinch in the alley sending an erotic shiver running through him. He held Will gently around he waist with one hand, and kept the other intertwined with one of Will's.

“Your sister said you didn't like to dance,” Bran said into Will's ear, “but I thought this sort of thing might be more your style.”

Taking the lead, Bran steered them lightly but firmly among the other revolving couples, his hand spread out against the small of Will's back. 

Their eyes kept meeting and holding. Bran noticed that Will was just enough shorter than himself that he had to tip his head back slightly in order to match his gaze.

I know what he looks like when he comes, Bran thought. He wanted to see that again, and more, and better, not in the dark of a back alley but in daylight, every day, all day, from now to the end of time. He wanted to make all sorts of extravagant promises, swear the deepest of oaths. He was falling hard and fast, and knew it, and couldn't find it in himself to much mind.

The moment was broken by the sharp shatter of breaking glass. The disturbance was sufficient to penetrate even Bran's love-ridden brain; and not just him. The music cut out as the other patrons also paused and turned. A gruff yell of “Hey! What are you on about? I'll call the police if you don't cut that out. Get out of here!” came from the front of the bar. 

Shouldering his way forward, Will following in his wake, Bran saw that a group of skinheads were being ushered out the door by a muscular black bouncer. The windows were all intact; he figured it must have been a bar glass that had been broken.

“Fucking skins,” he heard a lanky, long-faced older man say to his dance partner. “You can never fucking tell anymore if they're all right, or if they're National Front arseholes. Don't know what's to be done.”

“ _Duw_ ,” Bran said as they found Susannah and Barbara in the middle of the room. “I hate this.” His voice came out high and tight, his Welsh accent pronounced under the stress. “Always people there are just looking for someone to call a freak and beat down. It's awful.”

“It _is_ awful,” Will affirmed beside him, solemn and vehement.

“Useless wankers,” Barbara said. 

Susannah remained silent. She looked sober and serious.

A bartender was sweeping up the broken glass by the bar, and the music kicked back on. A round of free shots was poured on the house for all present, and Bran knocked back the scotch with gratitude, letting it settle his jangled nerves, lower his hackles, and he swallowed down also the hot rage he had felt, being disempowered and threatened in vulnerability, unable to act.

The music started up again, and the sound in the room rose as the patrons tried to shake off the disruption in the evening. But after only ten minutes, or so Susannah sighed and said, “I'm tired out, kids. You ready to call it a night? Or I can leave the bolt out for you, if you want to stay out.”

Bran said, “No, that's all right. Let's stay together, it's safer for all that way, and less stress and bother.” He looked sidelong at Will; he hoped it wouldn't be taken as any rejection. Will's still-wide eyes told him that he was not the only one struggling to regain his contented mood, after the sudden intrusion of violence into what had seemed a safe moment.

Susannah settled them up this time. They all walked close together for the few blocks between the pub and their lodging-house, moving quickly through the late-night streets. 

Most of the lights from the lodging-house's rooms were extinguished by the time they got back, but the hall light was still on, though, and they made their way to their door without mishap. Barbara turned on the lights with the master switch by the door when she let them in. 

There was a flurry of stirring about as everyone removed coats, scarves, gloves, shoes, and so on. Susannah filled four cups of water and left them sitting by the sink in the kitchenette, taking one for herself before crossing to her suitcase on the other side of the room and digging out a nightgown and a bathroom bag.

Bran felt hyper-conscious of his body, his motions, his skin, as he changed into his pyjamas and cleaned his teeth. Ostensibly, he was keeping his eyes low to politely allow the women to prepare for bed in relative privacy; really it was Will he was unbearably aware of. Will, who he had kissed, who had sucked him off behind a lesbian club, Will who knew his secrets and now knew his taste. 

The two double beds seemed to dominate the room, in a way that they had not appeared to earlier. If he'd thought that there was any chance of the Stanton sibs bunking in together, he was corrected when Barbara and Susannah settled into their shared bed with intimate familiarity. With a cheery, “G'night, you two,” Barbara put out her bedside lamp, and the far side of the room settled into the concealing shadows.

Will, wearing his own blue-and-white striped pyjamas, called back, “Good night.” He sat down on the side of their bed – the bed they were going to share – nearest to the dark, and pulled back the coverlet.

Then he cut his eyes up and sideways to look at Bran, standing in the kitchenette in his bare feet. “Come to bed,” he said, low and soft.

Moving like a man in a dream, Bran put out the bathroom light, checked the deadbolt on the door, and then climbed into bed beside Will Stanton for the night.

They did not touch, at first, perhaps overcome by shy boyish reticence. But that didn't last long; in the quiet cover of the darkness, soon they had shifted so that their bodies were pressed together, Will's back hot against Bran's chest, their knees tucked in parallel, and even their feet were touching. Layers of clothing separated their bodies, but hands could easily slip beneath those to roam and touch more freely.

Barbara and Susannah were right there on the other side of the room; it wasn't like they had the freedom or privacy to properly screw, even if Bran wasn't sure that all of the small sounds in the room's darkness were coming from his and Will's bed alone. He didn't want to fuck Will for the first time with Will's big sister just yards away, at any rate. But his good intentions didn't make his dick any less ramrod hard as it insistently nestled against Will's ass, and he couldn't quite help his hips from thrusting, shifting, just a little, again and again. Will, muffled by the blankets, breathed in sharply and arched back against Bran, rubbing, pressing ….

Bran would have thought they'd be up all night, tension thick enough to cut with a knife until dawn. But he'd underestimated the impacts of the day. It had been a long one; travel, revelations, scares, sex. He really was very tired. And Will, still recovering, had had a lot of exercise and activity in just one day. So it was no wonder, really, that he found himself blearily opening his eyes in the morning, unaware of ever having fallen asleep.

He was wrapped around Will like an octopus, and strands of Will's longish straight brown hair were tickling his mouth. In his arms, Will was sleeping soundly; not the gaunt unconsciousness Bran had found him in, last winter, but a soft replenishing sleep that left a trace of a smile tugging at the corners of Will's lips. Almost without thinking, Bran tightened his embrace, overwhelmed by a wave of tenderness. Will stirred, but did not wake, and after a moment Bran slipped back into a doze, catnapping until movements from the other side of the room indicated that the others were awake, and the morning proper was about to begin. Someone passed around the foot of the bed on her way to the bathroom.

He pressed a kiss to the corner of Will's closed eye, then watched as awareness came flooding back into Will's waking face, changing it dramatically, childlike innocence being replaced with adult, or more than adult, consciousness.

“Good morning, Bran,” Will said, and smiled, a little hesitantly.

“Good morning,” Bran answered with a broader grin, and after a kiss extricated himself and rolled out the far side of the bed to take his own turn in the bathroom.

As he washed his face, he heard Barbara's voice through the door, bossy and interrogating, big-sisterly: “So? What did you … (he could not hear a few words, water clogging his ears) … well … really went for that!” 

He was still smiling when he exited to find the Stantons and Susannah dressed and bustling about in the kitchen, making tea.

“What's everyone's plan for today?” Will asked, looking at Bran but pitching his question more generally. 

Barbara answered first, “We were talking about heading back to mum and dad's, staying over one more night there and catching an early morning train back up to Oxford Monday morning.”

“I don't have a plan,” Bran said. “Only, I'm hungry, and we should go find some breakfast. Will was so uncommunicative in his invitation that I told my da I'd call him, when I figured out how long I'd be. This time of year, people are coming and going between the town and the farm – getting ready for lambing, you know, and repairing all the walls and gates and fences and equipment and whatever after the winter's end. So there will be plenty of opportunities for me to catch a ride from the station, whenever I go back. I must be back by next week. Apart from that, it's no matter.” He met Will's gaze, open and steady, in a question or challenge.

“I wish you'd come back with us, just for the rest of the weekend,” Will said. “They should all like to see you, and – and I don't want you to leave for Wales, not yet. Or we can stay over another night here, I suppose, if you'd rather. There's no reason I have to go back with Barbara.”

Well, he'd certainly gotten what he'd asked for – what a set of offers! Bran's mind served up an image of what a night in the room _alone_ with Will could be like, and he almost vouched for the latter option. But then again, they could find privacy elsewhere. He would like to see Mr. and Mrs. Stanton – and, he realized, he wanted to see what the Stanton family would be like, restored and made whole. 

What he wanted with Will was more than sex, though sex was a non-minimal part of the equation. Still, if he meant to be the man's lover, that big, intertwined, invasive family was going to be part of his own life. It wasn't the worst thought, really; he'd been a solitary child, and, since University, a fairly solitary man. A change there might do him real good.

He shook his head; he was thinking too much. He didn't have to decide anything yet but what he wanted to do for the rest of the weekend. Going back home with the Stantons, and fucking Will senseless in that attic bedroom of his, sounded like a pretty good time.

“All right, then,” he said. “I'll come back with you. I'd like to see your parents.”

“I don't think we're in any kind of hurry,” Susannah said. “What do you say we go out to the outdoor market for breakfast, and then if there's anything else we want to do or see before we head for the station, we can.”

“I'm going to go use the public phone, then, and let them know we're all coming for the night.”

As Barbara left to use the phone in the hall, Will's smile grew and blossomed until it covered his whole face. “I'm glad you like them,” he said. Susannah busied herself with something in a notebook, and, after seeing her attention safely diverted, he more bravely added, “I'm glad you like me, enough to spend the rest of the weekend with, at least.”

“I like you a lot,” Bran said. “More than I like this city, I think. It is very exhilarating, in some ways, but I do not think it is for me. If there's nothing else you want to see, or show me, I'll be happy to head out to Buckinghamshire after breakfast.”

“Going upriver,” Will said, biting his lip. “I'm sorry you don't like London more; I want you to feel like you have options, Bran, and I had hoped … I don't know. I wouldn't chose to live here, myself. I just – ”

“Hey,” Bran said. “It's all right. We don't have to make any decisions today. We're on good enough terms with the river, we can take our time. Let's just enjoy ourselves. Enjoy being together.”

Will's expression brightened again, and Bran felt absurdly pleased with himself for having been able to usefully share his epiphany. How strange it was, after all the ways that great expanses of time figured in each of their biographies, that they each felt driven before time with uncomfortable urgency? And, he realized anew, what a good, strange, miraculous thing that was to be able to share.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for period-typical attempted anti-gay violence/terrorism.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes at the end.

In the London streets the sun was bright and the air was rapidly warming. Bran drew his dark glasses out of his jacket pocket and slipped them on before following the others out through the door and into the day.

They started off for the Berwick Street market, not far from where they'd begun their carousing the night before. For an al fresco breakfast they obtained cut fruit and tart yoghurt from one of the food stalls, with coffees and chai adding their further delicious scents to the morning melange. The market teemed and bustled around them. Everyone in Soho seeming to be out enjoying the Sunday sun after long months of dreary winter.

Sitting at a long table under a sheltering tent, with Will smiling beside him, flanked by friendly family, Bran thought that he might have spoken too swiftly when he'd rejected the idea of London altogether. It certainly had its charms. Will hadn't said much since they'd woken up together that morning, but he'd seemed happy – he hadn't stopped beaming broadly, the new smile rewriting his typically serious default expression – and Bran was taking that as a good sign. Whatever happened in his life afterwards, he knew that he would always remember this stolen, magical weekend in the springtime city.

By the time they set out again, heading south from Soho to catch a bus to Lancaster Gate Station, on their way to Paddington Station and the GWML train to Slough, Bran had his jacket slung over one arm. Will, he noticed, stayed bundled up in a sweater, coat, and scarf, in spite of the clement weather. 

“We usually take the bus from Slough,” Barbara said, her own jacket flapping unbuttoned, “but when I told dad you were coming with us, Bran, he insisted on driving out to meet us. On the whole, you might rather have the bus, it'll be less cramped than having all of us in jammed into his car, but he means well.”

“I appreciate it,” Bran said, and meant it, honestly touched by the gesture. 

As the bus stopped and started down the city street, he tried to pull apart the emotions of the moment. What was it that felt so good? The place? The people? Was it just limerence, some fleeting flare of feeling based on the unique sense he had with Will of being known, deep and absolute? But he was looking forward to seeing Mr. Stanton, too, and that had nothing to do with any of the grand secrets.

When they got off at Lancaster Gate Station, Hyde Park opened beside them in a green sward interrupted by the well-designed curve of the Serpentine.

Bran had learned better suspicion since the night before, and knew now to look about with some care, having come once more within the river's reach. Sure enough, he caught sight of her: Tamesis, elegant in a pale cream day-suit, hair done up and sleek, demurely observing the Sunday morning scene from the park entryway. The Serpentine was a constructed body, but the watershed that its architects had shaped and bent had belonged to the genius long before, since the upheavals that had formed the continent of Europe and the British isles at its periphery.

She turned to look at him, giving him a start; he hadn't thought himself likely to be observed. She waved a little, and smiled. 

Feeling unsure as to his exact safety status, he smiled back. Will might be right – she might _like_ him. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, either. His aunt. It was still bizarre to think of it. 

He had liked hearing her talk about his mother. He wanted to listen to more of her stories. He had no doubt that they would be worth his time.

Tamesis turned and went into the park, then, and Bran crossed the road with the rest of the group when the signal changed, and finished the tramp to the station. 

He wondered, as they waited for their train, if he missed his mother still, knowing what he did now of who she'd been and what she'd done. Was his anger, his bright and justified anger, at her abandonment of them, him and his father Owen, lessened? 

It seemed it was. Perhaps it was like the way that the Stantons seemed to bear no grudge against Will for their pain during the previous autumn, when he had been lost to the river's embrace and his self-forgetfulness. Barbara hadn't complained at all of her baby brother, for all she'd teased and mother-henned him; no matter how vague and full of holes his accounting for himself during the period of his captivity had been, his family seemed to have accepted it, and welcomed him back with open hearts.

Should he ascribe that to some magical manipulation on Will's part, given that it was apparently well within his powers to erase or even rearrange memories? As the train hurtled westward, Bran found himself glancing sidelong at Will, contemplating the rather chilling question. His new maybe-boyfriend wasn't really human, even more so than himself, and he was going to have to deal with that, no matter how much he wanted to say that it didn't matter. 

Could Bran deal with it? If Will didn't lie to him, he thought, then yes – but how could he really trust Will not to lie, when it was perfectly possible, and indeed perfectly in character, for him to rub out any evidence he pleased without a trace? 

In the seat beside him, laughing and chatting with his sister, Will looked very human, and very attractive. Sweet enough to be forgiven almost anything. Maybe his family knew more than he thought, and just let him get away with his secretiveness out of sheer affection.

It was a brief enough journey, the train rattling along for the space of a few hours; and then they were disembarking in Slough, where Mr. Stanton was waiting for them beside an idling station wagon, to continue their removal from the London metropole to the sleepy English countryside.

“Hey there, you lot,” he said, and then reached out to clasp Bran's hand. “It's very good to see you again, Bran. I'm glad my ridiculous boy hasn't sent you running back to Wales straight off.”

“It's good to see you too, sir,” Bran said politely, returning the clasp, earnestly pleased but still feeling a bit bemused by the sheer force of the other man's positive regard. 

They all piled into the car, Susannah taking honors in the passenger seat, Bran, Will, and Barbara packed into the back. 

“How was the show?” Roger asked the travelers in general as they started off on the half-hour trip to the Stantons' home in the small Buckinghamshire village of Huntercombe.

“Really interesting,” Susannah answered. “I hadn't heard of the artist before – he's not in my usual vein – but I'm glad to have had the opportunity to see his work.”

“Worth traveling from Wales for?” Barbara asked Bran, teasing on the square, with a current of earnest, good-faith curiosity in the question.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Will's been interested in that artist for a while. He bought one of the young man's school pieces for that collection of his in the Manor. What's his name again, Drew something?”

“Barney Drew.”

“Yes, that's right. A nice enough piece, but I confess Will was more prescient than I, in terms of assessing Barney Drew's future in the arts. I wouldn't have pegged it as anything so special.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if it's worth some money now,” Susannah said assessingly. “Could be much more, if he continues on his current upward trajectory. I'll be interested to see how his work develops; it seems ripe to me for some major transformations as he matures, and if he successfully exploits those he could be getting on to something really exciting.”

“I should be more active in using the trust's funds, I sometimes think,” Will mused from under Bran's elbow.

“I'd agree with you there,” his father said. “If you're going to go accepting that kind of largesse, I think you have a certain duty of good stewardship, and that involves staying active and forward-thinking. But I'm just an old tradesman, what do I know?”

“Artisan, surely,” Barbara demurred, and Roger Stanton took the correction with a graceful little inclination of his balding head.

As they drove into the village, the Thames winding in and out around them, crossing and re-crossing the road, the buds were still furled on the boughs of the trees, but early flowers bloomed in sheltered hollows, and the earth seemed vibrant with the promise of imminent growth.

Mrs. Stanton was outside digging in the front garden when they drove up to the old vicarage that served as the Stanton home. She put her spade down when she saw them approaching and walked back to the house to meet them, wiping her hands on her apron to get at the worst of the dirt.

She still kept them out and away when she embraced first Susannah, and then Bran, as they disembarked from the car by the front door.

“Welcome, dears, welcome. Only I won't get you all muddy. Let me wash up a bit, and then I've got things all ready to set down for tea.”

She tweaked Will's nose with a dirty thumb and forefinger, leaving a smudge that he wiped off with the back of his own hand.

They followed her around to the back and in, shedding jackets and boots in the back hall before heading into the kitchen. A quiche was set out, and a deep dish of roasted potatoes.

“Everyone wipe their hands,” and a warm damp towel scented with alcohol rapidly made the rounds.

Bran, glad for the meal after the journey, took a seat at the table and set to with gusto.

Alice Stanton rinsed her own hands in the rainwater hogshead by the back door, and then went to wash properly at the kitchen sink.

“Gwen will pop by for supper,” she said while they made an attack on her repast. “And I've invited Robin and Soraya and the baby, though I haven't heard back from them, so who knows what's going on there.”

As the food vanished, points of conversation increased. Mrs. Stanton asked after Jen Evans, and David Evans, and Bran's father, and the general condition of Welsh valley farming, with interjections towards Susannah explaining bits of family history. “I can't ask after your relations yet, dear,” she said to Susannah, “because I haven't met 'em yet. We'll have to remedy that sometime.”

“I'm sure mother and grandmama would love to host you, if you're ever in Birmingham,” Susannah said with a smile. Indeed, Bran knew just how impossible it was to resist Alice Stanton on an inclusionary charm offensive; he'd surrendered his answers to all of her questions without even token resistance, completely submissive to her right to know.

He was amazed to think that Will had succeeded for so long in keeping so great a secret from his mother. Had she never tried to have it out of him? Will's mild-mannered demeanor did not suggest the kind of iron that it would take to keep her at bay; but then, he knew well enough that appearances could be deceiving. He blushed and had to drop his eyes for a moment when he thought that Will did not look like the sort to blow one on his knees behind a bar, either, and look how that'd turned out. But did it bode well for them that Will was so much in the habit of pulling the wool over the eyes of those he loved?

They heard Robin shouting before they saw him, coming in at the front door about forty minutes after they'd sat down to tea. “Mother! Father! Are you all right?”

He came down the hall with his boots still on, and burst into the kitchen with a pale face. He was followed by his wife, carrying the baby in her arms. She, too, looked pale and scared. 

“We're fine,” Roger reassured his son. “What's going on? Why shouldn't we be?” 

“I should not have consented to come here,” Soraya said as Alice guided her to a seat at the table, supporting the child in her arms but not trying to take it away from her. “I thought it would be all right for a few years, Dr. Armstrong was such a lovely man. I was afraid to have my baby alone. My mother had her children surrounded by her entire family, I wanted to be close to someone, you know? But I was wrong. I never should have let us come to live here. I should have kept us safe! And now it is too late, even to get us out of the trap. They won't let us go!”

She relinquished the baby to her mother-in-law at last, turning away to curl in on herself, suppressing some emotion, weeping or laughing, until she was bent almost under the table, her hands over her face. Something was very wrong.

“What's happened?” Will asked his brother, in the shocked silence that ensued. “Robin?”

“We were out for the morning,” Robin said in a voice stretched and high with nervous tension. “Picking – ha! – picking wildflowers, down by Rook's Wood. It was such a beautiful morning.”

“We know,” Barbara said. “We had breakfast at an outdoor market in London, before we caught the train.”

“What went wrong?” Mr. Stanton asked in his quiet voice. “It doesn't look like anyone's hurt.”

Robin sighed heavily, and, still on his feet, yet imitated his wife for a moment in posture, drawing his hands down over his face. “No, thank god, we weren't hurt. By whatever grace, we weren't there. That's what makes it so upsetting – we might have been, and then – who knows? What might have happened? But we weren't, so they just egged the main house and spray-painted the side of the barn with ugly slurs.”

Mrs. Stanton breathed in sharply. “Someone attacked the farm?”

“That's hate speech,” Susannah put in seriously. “If you think you know who the culprit is, you should go to the police; you can prosecute these sorts of things, nowadays.”

“It could have been any one of a dozen of village hooligans,” Soraya said wearily, sitting back up and resting her elbows on the table to support her heavy head.

“Or their parents,” Robin agreed darkly, going to sit beside her and putting his arm around her back.

“You're not wrong,” Roger Stanton said. To Soraya, he added, “I'm so sorry, my dear. I wouldn't have welcomed you to my village as I did if I'd known what prejudiced beasts they really are. I should have given you better warning. I'm heartily ashamed for how provincial my neighbors have shown themselves to be.”

“I might have been surprised once, but not anymore,” Robin growled. “You wouldn't believe what drunken locals say to me in the pub, when they think of me as one of them. I don't want Lainey living here any more, I don't want her to grow up with this cloud hanging over her head.”

“You should go to the police, anyhow,” Will said – and it was not that his voice was unfeeling, but yet it was calm, and measured, and made what he suggested sound reasonable, practicable, well within reach. The emotional temperature of the room cooled, and everyone seemed to take a deeper breath. “If we call, I'm sure they'll come and take a report from you here.”

“That's a wise suggestion, and a point well taken,” his mother declared, decisive and commanding. “Roger, Barbara, you stay here with Soraya and the baby and speak to the police. Gwen should get here soon, you tell her what's going on when she does. I'm going to head down to the farm, and see what's to be done about the situation there. After the police have documented what they need to, I want to get things cleaned up as soon as we can. We shouldn't let the insult, to Soraya, to anyone, stand for a minute longer than we have to. I'll wait for the police to show up before I change anything. You tell them to send someone out to meet me when you phone them. Robin, do you want to come with me, or give me your keys and stay here with your father?”

Big Robin said, “I'd rather have something to do – I'm all nervous energy. Soraya, do you need me to stay? I will if you need me to.”

“No, that's all right,” Soraya said, calmer, but leaden, almost despairing. “Go and see what can be done.”

“Do you mind if Bran and I come along as well?” Will said.

Bran swallowed, emotion rising thickly in his throat. It was like the feeling he'd had in the Admiral Duncan, a feeling of helplessness in the face of the brutality of the world, the hateful characteristics of the human race. In the city or in the country, people were people – stupid and ferocious.

Perhaps Will really was the luckiest of them, to have turned out to not be human at all. 

The feeling continued to choke him as the little party arrived at the old farm. They stood in a circle in the yard, back to back, taking in the ugly sight of racial slurs and swastikas spray-painted on the side of the barn and the steps leading up to the house; composting and rubbish bins disturbed so that the yard was a smelly mess; smashed eggs staining the farmhouse windows. The sign that had advertised the property for sale had been pulled up, bent in half, and thrown into a corner or the yard.

The front door stood ajar, a silent testament to the violation of Robin and Soraya's home.

“Oh, Robin,” Mrs. Stanton breathed. “Oh, what a thing.”

Robin's broad shoulders were slumped, and he looked aged and bent. “We should wait to go in, right? For someone from the police?”

“Yes, dear, I think that would be best. When we can, we'll need to take everything you can think of for the three of you to stay at home with us for a while. I don't want the baby sleeping here if it's under any threat, and if we don't catch the culprits then there's no knowing if it's safe.”

“All right,” Robin said, sounding numbed and desolate. “I should try to make a list. Have you got paper or pencil?”

Silently, his mother withdrew the requested articles from her handbag and gave them to him.

“I wish Paul was here,” he said. “Nothing he could do, of course – but I still wish he was here, all the same.”

“We'll call him later, and you can talk,” Mrs. Stanton said. “Until then, remember that you're never alone with all of us.”

He laughed a little humorless laugh. “No, of course not. No privacy at all.”

The police arrived then, pulling into the yard in a cruiser with the lights running, though thankfully not with sirens. As Robin and Mrs. Stanton spoke to the officers, Bran pulled Will aside and said in a low voice, “What do we do next?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, wizard, what's our line of attack? What weapons, power, or leverage have we got? Robin sounded pretty sure the police weren't going to do much good. So, what good can we do?”

Will frowned. “Less than I'd like, I'm afraid,” he said. “My powers were given me to fight against the Dark, and the wardings or bindings or other enchantments that are mine are not meant to harm or hold human men and women.”

“Can't we, I don't know, go back in time and catch the culprits red-handed? Enchant everyone in the village to confess if they did it or not? There must be something.”

Will spread his hands. “It doesn't work that way, Bran, I'm sorry. I wish it did. I was armed for a specific war that is ended, now. I don't have the kind of powers you imagine. I've only been left here to guard against the Dark.”

Bran's anger and frustration must have shone clear in his face, because Will added, “What I can do is use my knowledge of purification and warding to help my brother cleanse this place. Maybe the magics won't hold a human malefactor, but it will help Robin – help all of us – to come together in the work of making this a safe hold again. Another kind of magic, you could call it. A human magic, not of the Light, but of the living.”

Mired yet in emotions of doubt and smoldering rage, Bran shook his head. “You make pretty speeches with the best of them, wizard. Will that be enough?”

“It will have to be,” Will said, catching up Bran's hand and pressing it between his own. “Human bonds,” he said. “You once told me they were the strongest thing on earth.”

“In a memory I no longer have?”

Will's mouth twisted with the bitterness of Bran's irony. “Yes, well. We cannot change what's past, only survive into the future.” 

He looked at Bran from behind a screening fall of hair, adding, more tentatively, “I want you to be a part of my future, our future. I hope I haven't disappointed you too much. I wish I knew how to fix the world and gift it to you; I would if I could.”

“I just wish I knew what to do,” Bran said. “Don't you feel it, too? They left you behind to be the vanguard in some war, but from what you just told me, your powers aren't going to do you much good. Are we just supposed to stand and watch, until we die or fade away?”

“I don't know,” Will said. “They didn't tell me why I was left here to watch, only that I would be left. I suppose – we work patiently. Love steadfastly. Forgive when possible. Do what we can to heal the world. But I don't know the answers, Bran, any more than you do. Do you hate me for it?”

“No, of course not. But I am tired of feeling helpless.”

“You make a difference,” Will said. “Just by being here. You've made a great deal of difference in my life, and all of my family's lives. I – you make a difference to me.” It wasn't _I love you_ , but it was close, hovering there in the charged atmosphere between them.

One of the police officers started walking about the yard with a camera, documenting the scene of the crime. Yellow crime scene tape began going up around the farmhouse.

Mrs. Stanton and Robin walked up to where Will and Bran stood, their report evidently given and their release obtained. “Come inside and help us tote and carry,” Mrs. Stanton said. “And we need to make up a list of any large things we see that are missing, for the sergeant.”

“We've got decent insurance, thank god,” Robin said. “For tonight, we only need to take a few things that are familiar for Lainey, plus collecting a few valuables and documents. Shouldn't be long.”

“Take as long as you need,” Bran said. “But I'll understand if you don't want to linger.” He understood what Will had meant about the place needing cleansing through some ritual action; with the violent words and symbols still splashed across the outer walls, the farm felt defiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for anti-South Asian racism, vandalism, and neonazi iconography.


	9. Chapter 9

“The damage inside the house isn't too bad,” Robin summed it up with a sigh, laying the list he'd made down on the Stantons' kitchen table. 

Bran was helping Will and Gwen clear the table and tidy the kitchen, after they'd all managed a very late supper. 

Robin went on, “It's worse on the outside than the inside. Looks like they grabbed the stereo and the telly and didn't go for much beyond that. Threw your books and papers around a bit, Soraya, but nothing missing there as far as I could tell. We don't keep money or other valuables lying around, so I'm afraid we must not have been a very plum catch. Though I'm sure that's not why they were there.”

“No,” Soraya agreed, looking over the list of lost and damaged things with a furrowed brow. “It's no wonder anymore why we haven't had a buyer.”

“Oh, Soraya,” Gwen said, “I hadn't put that together, but you're probably not wrong. How dreadful.”

“We got some of the mess in the yard cleaned up, and I dumped solvents on the spray paint, so at least you can't tell anymore what words they wrote. We'll need to do a good bit more work to put everything back together, though, including re-hanging the farmhouse door and stripping and re-finishing the paint where it's been stained or damaged.”

“We should let the rector know what's happened,” Will said. “And Dr. Armstrong. If the community's given the chance, lots of them will support you. They might need inviting, though, in so many words.”

“There's the neighborhood watch, too,” Gwen suggested. “This is the sort of thing they're supposed to help with, isn't it now?”

“I'll get in touch with everyone tomorrow,” Robin said. “Monday morning, so everyone will be about, that's some luck.”

Mrs. Stanton came in from the upstairs. “Roger's got Lainey in the bath,” she reported. “I've been making up beds. Barbara, you and Susannah should be all set in your old room, it's only a double bed but I'm sure you girls will manage.”

Will set down the dish he was washing and wiped his hands. “On that subject,” he said, “I was thinking that Bran and I maybe ought to spend the night out at the manor, to give you all some extra breathing room, what with Robin's family coming to stay unexpectedly and everything. Besides, I haven't been back for a month, I really should warm everything up and air it out. I do have a responsibility to the trust.”

It wasn't what Bran, his own hands still occupied with drying dinner plates, had been expecting – had Will been planning this? He hadn't said anything – but the idea did have a certain appeal.

Will said, “You don't mind, do you, mum?” His face very open and guileless.

Bran remembered Will saying that his mother hadn't been letting him sleep away from home since he'd been found that winter. He became aware of an undercurrent of tension building between mother and son.

From Alice's perspective, it was true that there was still a lot of reason to be afraid for the well-being of her youngest child; who knew why he had been lost, and if there was anything wrong with him deep down inside, if he'd tried to run away, if he'd tried to kill himself, if there was a risk he'd try it again. She had her boy by the scruff of his metaphorical neck, and other threats to her family had her protective hackles up, to boot. She wasn't going to let go until she was given some surety that it was safe to do so.

Time to offer some reassurances, then. Overprotective parents he could deal with.

“He just wants to show off his restoration work,” he said, teasing and gentle and nonthreatening. “Barbara warned me fairly that he was a dusty one.”

Alice Stanton looked at him; he looked back at her squarely, letting her see that he understood her trouble, and that he would relieve her of the watch while Will was away from the safety of her home. There were other crises for her to attend to; this one was handled.

She nodded. “Yes, I suppose you want to show off your pretty work to your young man. I forget how much of a home you made of the manor for yourself, with you living back here again as you have been these last few months.”

Will said, “Suppose I'll make Bran spend the evening dusting, for that crack earlier.” 

Bran had the startling thought, then, that Will could almost certainly have made his mother forget, or manipulated her mind in some other direct way to get what he wanted. But of course he hadn't. He was standing his ground against her, but fairly, as a son to a mother, not as an Old One to a mortal.

“Don't use him too hardly,” Alice Stanton said, the corner of her mouth tugging upward in a smile. “He's been a very good and helpful lad, on the whole.”

“No, I shan't,” Will said in sudden earnest. “I owe him too dearly for that.” He gave Bran a scorching look, naked and transparent in feeling, not hiding anything from anyone; and Bran ducked his own head to escape the intensity of that expression.

“Well then,” Alice said, and took Bran's tea towel to finish the dishes. “You'd better put together a parcel to take with you, for I know you've not a speck of food in the old place. Don't linger too much longer, if you want to get there before nightfall. It'll be getting cold, soon. Are you heading home to Wales tomorrow, Bran? I think Barbara and Susannah are planning on leaving first thing.”

Will gave Bran an interested look – they hadn't discussed Bran's further plans themselves as of yet. 

Bran hadn't really made any plans as of yet, ensconced in the delightful current of the new relationship budding between the two of them, and then tugged along by the pull of family need and current crisis.

“I might travel home tomorrow, or I might wait until the next day,” he informed everyone present. “I have some flexibility. With all the comings and goings this time of year it's easy to hop a ride up to Clwyd. I have to be back before the lambing starts, though, or they'll be hell to pay, so I can't linger for too long.”

Embraces were exchanged, as were telephone numbers – “Let me know next time you're going to be in England,” Susannah enthused.

Roger came down with the cleaned and pyjamaed baby on his shoulders. He said, “Be careful out there, you two. I know you're not – well, in any case – you've just had ample opportunity to see the kind of unpleasant forces that can come out to play, even here in Huntercombe. Keep your eyes and ears open, will you?”

“It'll be all right, dad,” Will reassured him. “I know things with Dawson's farm have been upsetting, but you and I both know that Huntercombe is mostly full of better people than that. Don't give up your faith in human beings completely.”

“We'll watch out, sir,” Bran added, deliberately speaking more to the point – why was Will pontificating about human nature when all the man wanted was a clear reassurance that no one would go looking for trouble, or falling into a bog for a sixmonth?

“Thanks,” Roger Stanton said. “Call us in the morning, or come over for breakfast, and we'll keep you filled in on the latest.”

Donning jackets, scarves, and boots by the door, burdened with a pack and a parcel apiece, they were at last discharged into the chill of the spring evening.

Silence enveloped them like a garment, very noticeable to Bran after the ambient noise factor they'd endured for the last days in London, and the constant chatter of the Stanton home. The only sounds were the chirpings of the early spring insects and the rustling of dead leaves in the light breeze. 

Will reached out for Bran's hand from the first, and held it interlaced with his own the entire way to Huntercombe Manor.

“I hope you don't mind that I didn't discuss it with you first, us coming here. It just sort of came to me, that it would be a good idea, and that I wanted to show you my home.. I'm not trying to hustle you, or anything. There are lots of bedrooms.”

“I know,” Bran said. “I've been there before.”

“You have? Oh, this winter. How strange, that you've been here, without my having known it.”

The manor grounds were unfolding beneath their feet, the drive leading them through an iron gate toward the stately mansion. Will led them up to the grand main entrance, drawing out a ring of keys to unlock the great front door and reaching inside to flip on the electric lights in the entryway. He chattered on, confidingly, “I've been wanting to come back for a while, but – mum's not the only one who hasn't wanted me to be alone. I think I'd almost forgotten what it was like, to be really vulnerable – before the river reminded me. And now poor Robin's affairs, as well. Did you know that Frank Dawson, and his father Old George, who had that farm before, were Old Ones themselves? I never knew for sure that they were stationed here to watch over me, but it certainly seems probable, given full hindsight. Miss Greythorne, the last lady here at Huntercombe, was a member of that circle as well. That's part of what I like about this place – it reminds me of them.”

The great house was lighting up now at Will's touch, the glow seeming to radiate out from Will as he stood in the doorway; the more distant rooms still dark and motionless, as they would be until their inhabitant returned them to life and warmth. 

Bran would not have thought his focus could be distracted from the thoroughly desirable picture that Will made then, domestic and gold-toned – but, pricked by some subliminal cue, he turned to look back to where the darkness was gathering thickly across the drive.

Then he saw what it was that had moved.

On the dark sward before them stood an unearthly figure. A human face, head of a stag, ears of a wolf, golden owl-eyes strangely similar to Bran's own, all above the quivering and powerful body of a great horse. Herne the Hunter looked less human now than he had the last time Bran had seen him, when he had appeared to him on the manor grounds with welcomes and warnings. 

Around the hunter's four hoofed feet, circling, were at least a dozen white hounds with red ears, fiery eyes, and intently grinning toothy mouths.

Will, noticing Bran's silence, turned from where he stood in the doorway. He froze, clearly able to see Herne every bit as much as Bran could; something that Barbara had not been able to do, before. Any enchanted being Bran could see and hear, Will was likely to be well aware of. Well, that was some comfort, at least.

“Greetings, Old One,” the huntsman said in a voice like a muted trumpet. “And the young Pendragon, who is returned.”

Bran said warily, “Not for long, not yet.”

“I felt you return,” Herne reiterated, insistent. “Today, I heard your heart crying out for vengeance. There was an attack against those you hold as family, motivated by human spite and tribal hatreds. A hunter knows much.” Was that a hint of irony in the musical, resonant tones?

“Do you know who attacked my brother's home?” Will asked the strange figure of the huntsman, his own voice low and respectful.

“I do not,” Herne said, lowering his horned head slightly in acknowledgement of Will's right to question. “You seek to find a trail that human eyes cannot? The Wild Hunt can pursue a malefactor to the ends of time and space.”

“The Wild Hunt?” Bran echoed him.

“I lead the Hunt,” Herne said. “Once we hunted the Dark; now we hunt foolish mortals in their dreams, to remind the black-hearted of what it is to be vulnerable and in fear. I offer you our force to back your vendetta, power to enact your sentence on those who have threatened you and yours. Will you ride tonight with the Hunt?”

“I don't know how to ride a horse,” Bran admitted. “Not well. Not at night.”

“You will learn,” the huntsman said, sounding … tolerant, and even perhaps a little amused. “For tonight, and tonight only, I offer you my own back. Will you mount, and ride with me?”

Bran looked back at Will, who still stood silhouetted in the light of the doorway. Will's face was an emotionless mask, giving away nothing; not dread, not assurance. Bran was going to have to make his own decision, without other counsel.

There was no doubt as to what was in his heart.

“I do desire to ride with the Hunt,” he said, loud enough to be heard by both Old One and huntsman. “If it means I can find the villains who made those markings … yes, that would be a justice worth pursuing. I want to _do_ something, not just sit around feeling shocked and sad.”

Then, to Will, he added, speaking more softly, “I need to do this, but – I don't want to lose you, either. I as good as promised your mother not to leave you alone. Yet here I am, purposing to take off on a wild goose chase. If you will wait for me here, I will come back to you, presently. Do you promise me? Faithfully?”

Will nodded. “I promise. I will be all right here for a few hours. You don't need to worry about me. There's nowhere I'd rather be than the place to which you'll return.”

“Go sleep in your own bed for once,” Bran said, “and you won't be alone for long. My promise in exchange for yours.”

Leaving Herne waiting on the greensward, he kissed Will lingeringly in the open doorway. When he at last broke away, breathing roughly, he leaned his forehead against Will's, still holding the side of Will's cheek with his cupped hand. “We keep being interrupted by circumstance,” he said. “Don't blame me for it, love. We'll have time enough, someday soon.” 

Then he turned his face back to where Herne stood waiting.

“Mount,” Herne commanded for the third time. “It is time to set forth, before the tides of the night turn against us. These things have their accustomed hour.”

Trembling inwardly, Bran steeled himself to approach the eldritch figure, which sank to kneel before him so that he could climb astride the gleaming span of the equine back, and then rose again, and rose, and rose, lifting up into the dark and clouded sky.

“The hounds will obey your commands, if you give them,” Herne told him.

Bran swallowed. “All right, then. To the old Dawson farm, hounds, and catch the scent of anyone not of the Stanton family, or with ill intent. Who painted the swastikas? They're the ones we want to find”

The hounds that curvetted around Herne's ankles began to bell with anticipation. “Go!” Herne called, and then they were mounting the currents of the wind to travel above the roofs, forests, and roads of Huntercombe. The sound of a hunting horn seemed to accompany them, a moot and then trourourout, trout, trout, trourourout. trourourout, trout, trout, trourourourout, and Bran realized that it was Herne himself, with no instrument put to his lips, that was making the call.

Like a storm in the night they swept over the farm, where it stood blackly hunched against the dark, the defamation of the circled buildings mercifully cloaked. The hounds sniffed around, then one lifted his head and gave a baying cry.

“They have the scent,” the huntsman said. Giving again the call like a hunting horn, he signaled to the pointing hound to pursue its quarry, and he and its fellows leapt again into the sky to follow it, yammering and belling like a roll of thunder.

They passed in tempest and in storm over Huntercombe, the air fairly crackling with the hounds' intent pursuit. Following the white dog's lead, the Wild Hunt chased the scent up into a cul-de-sac neighborhood that was dotted with large, well-appointed homes; not mansions and marble halls, but the pleasant residences of the upper-middle class. The hounds came to rest circling one of them, yipping and dancing excitedly with the nearness of their quarry.

Circling the house, he could see in at the windows. In one bed, a man and a woman slept; in another, an adolescent boy.

“As we near the guilty, their sleeping minds become aware of our presence,” Herne told Bran, his voice stern and pitiless. “They seem to dream of us; that they are pursued, the victim of a terrible chase that robs them of all human dignity, stripping them to the level of bare life. If they do not repent, and make amends, the feeling will only grow in them, and cause them to act against their interests. The baying of the hounds pursues them then in waking, as well as in sleep.”

Atop the hunter's back, Bran shuddered. 

“Do you pity them, then?” the hunstman asked.

“In a way, I do. They are already weak beings, with poor morals and a bad sense of community. To make things that much worse for them ...”

“I understand,” Herne said.

Bran blinked. “You do?”

“I do,” Herne confirmed. “But it is not my concern. The Wild Hunt is part of the natural magic of existence, and is immutable. It is inevitable that the guilty suffer inward torments of conscience. I am only the executor of that Law. For those who have done nothing wrong, I bring nothing but a distant sound of dogs barking in the night.”

“Can you tell?” Bran asked. “Can you tell, which of the people here were the ones who did it?”

“No,” Herne said. “The scents of humans are too intertwined, as are their morals. But they will know, and feel their consciousness of guilt, and that is all that matters.”

Bran found that his whole body was vibrating with intensity as he watched the hounds of the Wild Hunt lay siege to the house; one of these people had done something shocking, breaking the bounds of human society with violence and filth, and he found that, as long as no innocents were at risk, he didn't mind the idea of them suffering some retributive nightmares, after all. 

The Wild Hunt returned to Huntercombe Manor in the pale hour of the earliest dawn, satiated and run out, the hounds' red tongues lolling from their mouths as they panted along. The world was washed with grey by then, leeched of all color in anticipation of the coming sunrise, and all was still and cold, covered over with a heavy fall of dew.

Herne dropped to his equine knees in front of the door, where hours before he had met Bran, and taken him up.

“You did well, son of Arthur,” the huntsman said. “My hounds thank you for their quarry. You are welcome to ride among us again whenever you will – although not, after this once, on my back. Get yourself a horse, if you would be a hunter.”

“Thanks,” Bran said, insouciant and ferocious, the blood pounding in his ears from the exhilaration of the ride, the chase, the rush of pursuit, the flush of victory. “I'll keep it in mind. You lot are terrifying, you know that?”

Herne dipped his head once more in a gesture of acknowledgement, then stepped back, and back once more, and yet further back, until he had vanished from Bran's sight. The sound of yipping dogs faded into the distance, down over the forested hills where the sun would be rising.

Bran turned to face the great front door. He had no key, but when he put out his hand to try the handle he found that it opened to his touch without resistance; Will had left it latched, but not locked. Blessed be trusting country manners!

The electric lights were still on in the foyer. Bran pried off his muddied boots and left them in the hall. He knew where Will's room was, though he'd not been in it before. There had been yellow crime scene tape up around the butler's quarters on the lower level back then, an unpleasant remembered visual echo of the crime scene tape currently decorating the Dawson farm. 

Pushing open the half-closed door of Will's room, he was greeted by an early slant of pale half-light; the room had an eastern exposure, designed to be helpful for the household staff who had to rise every day before dawn.

It was a spartan little space, furnished with dark wood, not elaborate but all in impeccable taste, and neatly kept. A thin layer of dust over the table, chairback, bookcases, and bureau top told of the occupant's recent absence; and the room in general had that vacant feeling belonging to uninhabited homes. The bed was small, a simple double covered by an old quilt, positioned so that the sleeper could see out the window, when the curtains were not drawn. 

As Bran came in, Will shifted in the narrow bed; a squeaking floorboard had him sitting bolt upright. “It's only me,” Bran said.

“Bran?” Will's voice was thick with sleep and something heavier, something like longing,

“Yeah. Back from the hunt.”

The light was increasing with every moment, the dawn drawing near.

“Come to bed?” Will said, and Bran didn't care how small the bed was, nothing was going to keep him out of it after an invitation like that.

“You'll have to shift over for me,” he said. “We should be able to fit, if we don't mind being intimate. I used to share a narrower mattress than this in my uni dorm room.”

Will rolled as far as he could to the one side, and, after shucking off another layer of his clothes, Bran slid in next to him. It was a closer fit than he'd thought – he'd been a slight teen in that remembered dorm room, and evidently things had changed. He was moulded to Will's back, spooning him so closely that Will was practically lying in his lap. He was very aware of what Will was wearing – an old, soft t-shirt and briefs – and what he wasn't. Bran was similarly stripped down himself, and his dick was very much sensitized to their body contact, with only those few layers of cotton between them.

“Was the hunt well?” Will said, and Bran laughed and reached out to wrap his arms around him, tugging him that much closer.

“Yes,” he said. “I'll tell you all about it in the morning, but, yes. All manner of things are well.”

Will twisted, turning his torso so that he could look at Bran in the ever-increasing light. He reached up a hand to touch Bran's cheek, tentative and wondering. 

“I used to dream of this,” Will breathed, soft and reverent. “That you were here, making love to me. I'd be lying here alone, touching myself, imagining you ...”

Bran kissed him, then. “Tell me,” he said, voice low and guttural. “Tell me what you imagined, darling. How do I fuck you, in your fantasies?”

“You make me yours,” Will confessed.

“Mine,” Bran said, almost growling it into Will's ear. He reached a hand down to stroke along the curve of Will's genitals, his balls, up to the pucker of his anus. “You want me to fuck you, Will Stanton, make you mine?”

Will shifted, rolling over so that he could more effectively thrust against Bran's touch. “God, yes,” he said.

“Here,” Bran said, “get over on your knees, then.” He rolled back as far as he could, tensing, giving Will room to maneuver without falling out of the narrow bed. When Will had positioned himself, Bran scrambled up after him. Balancing on his own knees, he pulled Will's shirt off over his head, then tugged his briefs down over his hips. Will kicked one foot free, and Bran roughly yanked his own shirt off and discarded his own underwear.

Re-positioning himself to kneel behind Will, his fully erect cock pressed against Will's crack, he teased a promise of entry. “My wizard,” he husked, bending over Will's back to kiss and caress his neck, ears, throat, shoulders. “My _dewin._.”

He reached his hand back to finger Will's anus again. “Oil … in the nightstand,” Will managed to get out.

“You just wait until it's my cock sliding into you, not my finger, and see if you can form words at all,” Bran said, leaning over to fish out the requested bottle of lubricant.

Will's bare skin was almost as pale as Bran's, this early in the season. Bran looked down at him, strange and beautiful in the early light, and wanted to crow with triumph. He wanted to kiss every inch of Will's flesh, to touch him inside and out.

“I want you,” he gasped. “Is this all right? Are you with me, boyo?”

“Oh yes.”

Then Bran was thrusting inside of him, almost overwhelmed at first by the sensations of heat and tightness.

“Oh,” Will said again, “oh, oh, oh.” And Bran took his earlobe into his mouth and bit down, holding Will's wrists in his banded hands as he fucked him hard. It was an experience Bran found frankly delightful; to reduce that wise control to lust-addled witlessness left a fellow feeling rather chuffed.

Then Will moving, shifting his hips, _fucking back_ , and Bran lost his grip on his cocky control, tumbling into every bit as much of an erotic daze; god, it felt good, so good … he realized that he was saying it out loud, a sort of rhythmic chant, his mouth still pressed close against Will's upturned ear as they humped almost frenetically.

On the edge of coming, he admitted raggedly, “I think I'm falling in love with you, Will Stanton, did you know that? Or remembering I'd fallen in love with you before, once long ago.”

Will cried out sharply at that, coming in a hot torrent all over Bran's eager helping hand, there to stroke him through the several pulses of his orgasm. The heady musk of sex and semen rising in his nostrils, Bran thrust hard once, twice, three times more, and then vented himself in a yell as he pumped his own load. 

“I love you too, of course,” Will was saying at the same time, their sounds overlapping as the sun rose over the horizon, turning all the light to pink. “And have done since long ago.”

Bran dropped down to the bed, dizzy in the aftermath of passion. Gathering Will to him, he kissed his beloved's neck, cheek, mouth. “I'm not going to wake up and find that this is all a dream?” he asked.

“No,” Will said. “You're not dreaming.” 

“I'll be sleeping soon, I'll tell you that … I'm as tired as, well, as a dog. I don't think I'll be getting back to Wales this morning! I bet the college-goers are already headed back to Oxford.” Wadding his discarded shirt up into a ball, he swabbed at the worst of their mess.

“'Night's candles are burnt out,” Will quoted to him, “and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.' Sleep now, love. Anything that needs doing can wait for a few hours. We can be this selfish, steal this much time. Sleep.”

Bran had relinquished his awareness before Will had stopped speaking, the gentle tones of Will's voice following him down into dark and restful oblivion. 

Soon, too, Will slept, the two of them twined close together in the single little bed. In the morning outside the manor, the village was opening up for the day, yesterday's news getting its first airings as everyone discovered what goings-on there had been in the dark hours of the night.


	10. Chapter 10

Bran could tell that it was much later in the day when he woke next; first by the position of the sun, risen high enough to leave Will's room mostly shaded, and then by the sound of a clock, off somewhere in the distance of the great house, striking noon as he lay drowsing, Will still sleeping bonelessly in his arms.

At last, giving in to the inevitability of consciousness, he yawned and stretched, dislodging Will, who shifted and grumbled, nearly falling off the bed all together before he managed to transition likewise to full awareness.

“Good morning,” Bran said. He felt fairly groggy, himself, and his mouth was dry and tasted awful – but he wanted Will to feel good about waking up with him, after their love-making the night before. It was important, more than worth stifling a nascent bad mood.

“Good morning,” Will answered, and Bran had his reward for good behavior when Will gave him a shy smile. Will's moving was rewarding in other ways, as the contact with Bran's groin reminded him vividly of certain nocturnal pleasures enjoyed.

Then Will was pulling himself up and away, rolling out of the far side of the bed and rising to his feet. He pulled clean underthings out of a bureau drawer, throwing Bran a spare set. “I think those should fit you,” Will said. “Do you want a shower? I'm going to go start some coffee.”

Standing under a stream of hot water, teeth cleaned, Bran indeed felt much better; indeed, quite a bit better than he'd felt in some time. Possibly ever. He'd made love with Will the night before. And, he reflected, Will hadn't showered, which meant that his body still carried the traces of it – evidence, if it should be needed, to prove that it had been no dream. The thought of Will bearing his mark sent a possessive thrill shooting down through the pit of his stomach, and he reached down to grab his cock and quickly bring himself off, thinking of Will making coffee while still smelling of Bran's sex.

Loose-limbed and relaxed after the orgasm, he turned off the shower, dried himself and hung the towel, and put on the set of Will's underthings. He didn't see his bag – probably it had been left in the front hall. He pulled on his jeans, but left his feet bare, and didn't bother with his sweater, before he went padding off down the corridor in search of his boyfriend.

“We are going out, right?” he said as he finally found the kitchen, where Will was portioning out sugar and cream in little silver vessels, two steaming mugs of coffee aromatic on the counter behind him. “You and me? In something? Together? Dating?”

“In a relationship,” Will confirmed. “Yes. I mean, I hope so. Are we?”

“Yes,” Bran said, and stepped in close to kiss him.

His breath was minty. “I brushed in the kitchen sink,” Will admitted. After a few more minutes of kissing, he added, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Bran said, somewhat startled to realize just how much. “Starved. Where's that parcel of your mum's? I want all of it.”

The kitchen was evidently in working order, despite the house's general emptiness; and in twenty minutes Will had whipped together an omelette, a dish of cut fruit, and a delicious-smelling rasher of bacon, and was engaged in buttering toast.

“I didn't know you could cook,” Bran said. “I can, a little, but you seem really comfortable with it.”

“I help Gwen, sometimes,” Will admitted. “Or, I used to. Growing up with so many of us, we all had to pitch in, and it was a way that I didn't mind helping.”

Bran washed the dishes while Will tidied away the remaining ingredients. Leaving the dishes to dry in the drainer, they went together then back to the front entryway, where Bran's bag had, in fact, been abandoned.

With the bag securely slung around one shoulder, Bran paused in the hall, looking at the row of portraits. Will, coming to stand beside him, said, “That's the portrait by Barney Drew, the one that my father mentioned yesterday. I bought it from a studio sale he held as a student.” He indicated the dramatic pastel of the hawk-faced man.

Bran stopped then to really scrutinize the artwork, understanding that it was a true portrayal of a figure he'd known, a person who had played a pivotal part in his own forgotten past. “I've seen this face before,” he said. “Not – I don't remember, or anything like that” he added hurriedly, as Will sucked in a sharp breath. “But I've seen Barney's paintings. This man was in one of the Matter of Britain series, the big ones. He's Merlin.”

“Oh,” Will said. “Yes.”

Bran looked closer at the pastel. “But he doesn't look like Merlin here, he looks like someone from the 20th century.”

“Barney knew him, as did I, under another name. He was my mentor, teacher, general; to Barney, he was a beloved family elder, an honorary great-uncle. That's who Barney was drawing when he did this piece, his Great-Uncle Merriman.”

“Does he know that his great-uncle was Merlin in another life, then?”

“Of course not. He was made to forget, when the Dark and the Light both left this world.”

“Why 'of course not'? It's information about his own family, his own accomplishments. Why shouldn't he be permitted to keep it?”

Will sagged suddenly, leaning against the corridor wall, and Bran realized that he had almost been shouting. 

Guilt curled in Bran's chest. “I'm sorry for getting upset,” he said. 

“It's all right,” Will said. “I understand why you'd be angry. I wish I could be.”

“I don't understand,” Bran admitted. “What's keeping you?”

Will stood in silence for a long moment, his face working as he clearly struggled to give Bran an answer. At last, Will said, “Bran, I – I want to tell you a story, like the ones I wrote to you in my letters. I think that is the best way to answer you, in this. It is important to me that you understand; if we are going to be together, the way we talked about, you'll have to understand. It will never work, otherwise.”

“You look awful, almost faint. I'll listen to your story, but let's get you sitting down, first.”

“Yes,” Will said. “We can sit in the library.” He laughed mirthlessly; Bran did not understand the joke, but did not ask as he shadowed Will down the hall, through the great painted ballroom, and into the reading room. 

Bran had come there once before in dreaming thought. The space, small and enclosed, seemed a safe repository for dark secrets and intense emotions, and that, perhaps, was the reason why Will had gone there, rather than back to the naked intimacy of his bedroom, for this act of explanation.

“A story,” Will resumed once he was safely ensconced in one of the leather chairs at the familiar reading table. “I want to tell you. About Merlin, Merriman Lyon, who was a great Lord of the Light, and the hawk he lost to the dark. It is not – it is not a happy story.”

“All right,” Bran agreed again, interested to hear what it was that Will was struggling so hard to say, and how it connected with their earlier argument. Will had told him more stories about Arthur than Merlin, so far, but it was clear that Merlin was nevertheless very important, and not least to Will himself, personally.

“My brothers and sisters probably remember some version of this,” Will confessed. “Some of it happened in the time right after my eleventh birthday, when I had just come into myself as an Old One. Mary could probably corroborate, and Paul. Other parts took place here, at Huntercombe, in the 19th century – so I am the only one who saw them, the only one who is still on this earth.”

Bran nodded, gesturing his understanding so far.

Will continued, his voice adopting a different, more formal cadence as he spoke, “Further still in the British past, many centuries ago, the Old One called Merlin had adopted a young ward, a boy who had lost his family. Hawkin, the ward, saw himself as Merlin's son, and knew all about his lord's true nature, and the struggle between Dark and Light. Merlin made use of Hawkin in certain of his magics, translocating him through time – perhaps wrongly. I sometimes think so, anyway. Some of that happened here, in this very room, a hundred years ago. And Hawkin betrayed the cause of the Light, through simple human emotions of envy and abandonment. He was doomed to walk through time until he met the Sign-Seeker – me, that is. He was just about crazy by then, a dirty old tramp. Mary could tell you all about how bad he smelled. He died; it was the best thing that could have happened for him, I think. I have never felt right about it.”

Will was silent for a moment, then added, all in a rush, “It is not true, the way that some of the legends have it, that Arthur attempted to kill a bastard son in his cradle, or that he massacred the innocent in an attempt to stamp out the babe – but there are sins at the heart of the story of the Light, Bran, that I cannot ever quite forget. And, you see, sometimes it is better, for mortals, not to know what it is we do.”

“ _Duw_ ,” Bran said. “And that was how you were introduced to this destiny of yours, all of that happening when you were eleven? I'm amazed you didn't run screaming to the antipodes.”

Will's forehead wrinkled. “Never seemed like an option,” he said. “The thing was, it was all perfectly true, what they said about me. I wasn't really an ordinary boy like the others. I really did have these gifts. They made me see it, made me banish and summon fire that first day, and so I know. The gifts were real and undeniable, and I so were the responsibilities that went with them. We were fighting a war. There was no time for that sort of thing, for kicking at the traces; Merriman made that clear to me from the start.”

“Mmm,” Bran responded, noncommittal, but encouraging of further confidence..

Again Will took up his story. “It harmed Hawkin immensely, getting caught up in the affairs of the Light. I think that it was after the tragedy of losing him to the Dark that Merriman became so very cautious about keeping our affairs separate from the world of men. It is why he wanted the Drew children to forget, and would have preferred it for you, as well. I am – I am going out on a limb, Bran, in the hope that perhaps you still have enough of your true nature about you, enough claim by being who and what you are, that the knowing will not be harmful to you. If you were an ordinary man – I never would have let you know, or remember, any of this, no matter how you begged me. I would never want to harm you, by thrusting you into matters that could cause damage.”

“But,” Bran argued, after a considering moment, “surely it was Hawkin's own choices that were the problem? Could not a man know, and be a better sort, and not come to harm at all?”

“I don't know,” Will admitted. “Perhaps you are better positioned to answer questions of that sort than I am. The other men I know whose lives have been touched by the Light, men who are of highest good character, I think, are Owen Davies and John Rowlands. I don't know how to judge if your father's been harmed, but certainly poor John was.”

“John? I mean, I know what you mean about my Da, but – what does John have to do with it?”

Will smiled sadly. “I think we broke his honest heart, in our warring,” he said. “Dear good Jon. His wife Blodwen was an agent of the Dark. She did not die in an accident. John, too, was made to forget. I worried then that he would not heal completely, or might heal awry.”

It was startling information, but easy, once known, to slot into consonance with Bran's personal knowledge of John Rowlands. “Yes,” he reflected, “he was less bitter, when I was younger. Still, my father at least is an argument against your point, not for it. I do not think he would trade his time with my mother for the world, and I do not see that it has harmed him so much to have loved her.”

Will's smile became a shade less sad. “You're right,” he said. “He never would. Thank you, Bran, for reminding me that – that it is not all bad examples and tragedies.”

“I – you're welcome,” Bran said. “You really don't get much out of this 'having great powers' business, do you? It's all constraints! You know everything, but you can't do anything.”

“It was different, when I was first awakened. We were in the heat of war, then. I could do much, against the enemy powers that sought dominion. Now, though, the war is over. My powers were never meant to be used on human beings. And, if they knew about some of them – if they knew about the immortality – well, there could be a lot of trouble in it.”

“I never thought immortality would be all that,” Bran said.

“No,” Will mused. The colors of the wood panelling and studded leather around him were warm and living, but Will himself in that moment looked like a marble sculpture, hewn from pale and unmoving stone. “I don't know if I even really understand that difference in myself, as of yet. I think, once I have lived for thousands of years, like Merriman my master had before he taught me, I might feel quite a different sort of being. Now, I still mostly feel like an ordinary young man, except that I can't forget any of the ways in which I am not, and never will be.

'Other children are conscripted as soldiers, I know, in places around the world – but it must be different if you grow up expecting to be thrust into violence. I don't mean to say better, the accumulated trauma of that kind of childhood must be huge, but – before Merriman confronted me with my true nature, when I turned eleven, I thought I was an ordinary little boy with an ordinary life stretching out ahead of him. I had ordinary expectations, ordinary hobbies, ordinary friends. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn't a child at all any more, and the great war of the Light and the Dark had swallowed up my life.

'What was I supposed to do, Bran? Twelve years old, possessed of ancient knowledge, arcane powers, and a good boy soprano? Was I supposed to just revert back, go on being a kid, and then an adolescent, pick a subject, get my A- and O-levels. Get married and start a family, knowing that I'll outlive any human being I meet?”

Bran raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that would be a problem,” he agreed.

Miserably, Will admitted, “I think about it now, sometimes. The one upside to being the youngest in the whole family is that it will make sense for me to outlive them, so I don't need to do anything too awful like staging my death. But I don't know about the little ones, like Lainey. How will it be if her Uncle Will, who was a young man when she was a baby, is still hale and hearty when she's grown to be an old woman herself? I want to be a good uncle to her, and be a part of her life. Am I going to have to abandon her, in the end?”

“I'd been thinking of it the other way around,” Bran said. “Of how terrible it was, that there was no hope for you to ever go first. No chance of your not being left behind.” He shifted in his chair so that his knees were touching Will's, his hands resting near to Will's.

Will bent his head, hiding his eyes behind the fringe of his straight brown hair. “Yes,” he managed, voice hoarse. “There is that, too.”

“I understand now, for what it's worth,” Bran said, reaching out to take Will's hand in his own, “why you don't want to tell Barney Drew what you know. I'm happy, myself, so happy to know, and it's a natural impulse to want to share. But I won't press you on it anymore. I understand that it's a painful subject. I understand that you still feel under constraint from your masters.” 

He almost regretted having pushed Will for answers in the first place – but, as Will himself had said, they had to have this out.

Will said, sounding defensive, “I'm free to do as I want; there's nothing asked of me, day to day. But I cannot stop being what I am, over years and decades of human time, and some secrets will always be mine to guard.” 

“All right,” Bran said again. “Like I said, I'm sorry. I won't press you on it again.”

He shifted Will's hand from right to his left, freeing up his own right hand to reach out and touch Will's cheek. And then he leaned in, just a little, and waited for Will to meet him in a kiss. It was tentative and sweet, when it came, and Bran nipped Will's lower lip with his teeth to show that things were not so bloodless between them.

At last, Will pulled back, breathing heavily. “You haven't told me much yet about the Wild Hunt,” he said.

“Well, we've been a bit occupied. What do you want to know?”

“You were able to discover who did it?”

“The hounds led us to a house in a subdivision. Nice place, naff. I could probably give you the street and the house number, if I could look at a map. No way to know who in the household was involved.”

Solemn, Will asked, “What did Herne do to them?”

“Haunted their dreams and kickstarted their consciences, as far as I can tell. He's quite something, Herne; smart, and a little scary.”

Will raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” Bran emended, “a lot scary. I told him so, when he let me off here.”

“Be careful with him, Bran,” Will said, his eyes dark and reflective. “He's not like you and me. He's not even really a person at all. If you'd seen – he has the capacity to be cruel. The Wild Magic can be punishing for the human beings in its path. I don't want to see you consumed in that way, please.”

“Hey, it's okay,” Bran said, leaning in for a kiss, stroking his thumb reassuringly along Will's jawline. “Nothing bad happened to me. I get what you mean about Herne, but I'm a grown Pendragon, I can watch myself. At any rate, It's that punishing quality that makes him the one I need right now. We need some power on our side. If you aren't able, Old One, then I'll ally with the Wild Magic, too. I can tolerate difference in the ends of achieving my goals.”

The clock chimed two, then, and Will, who had been leaning silently into Bran's touch, evidently deriving comfort, opened his eyes wide. “Goodness,” he said, “I hadn't realized it was so late. Sorry, I didn't mean to corner you with my feelings quite so interminably. Shall we call around mum and dad's and see what everyone's doing?”

“You do that,” Bran said. “I'm going to go and get properly dressed. I don't need to be hanging around your parents in your clothes, they'll get the wrong idea.”

“Do you need to call home, as well? Settle your travel plans?”

“So ready to be rid of me? Talk to your folks first, and let's find out what's going on. If I hadn't been up all last night, that would be one thing. As it is – the sheep and the farm can spare me for one more day, whatever. I'll call my da this afternoon, arrange a pickup for tomorrow.”

“Never ready to be rid of you,” Will said, leaning over Bran's chairback to kiss him. “It's only that I don't want to get you in trouble, keeping you too long from your life and your family.”

“Don't be so sure that you're not part of that,” Bran said. “You phone home now. I'm going to go put on some of my own pants.”

There was a receiver set at one of the reading desks. The phone at the Stantons' house rang and rang, and Will gave it up after a minute and called Gwen's bakery instead. Bran had meant to head straight back to Will's bedroom and change, but he stood lingered in the doorway for a moment, listening to Will chatting pleasantly with the clerk, before the other end was evidently passed to his sister. 

“Gwen, hi,” Will said, soft and shy. “We've slept late, and I'm trying to find out where everybody's got to. Oh, they're there all ready? Okay.” After a pause, he said, “What, really? Just like that? And there's evidence matches? Goodness.”

He covered the end of the receiver with one hand and told Bran, now listening intently, “They've had a confession, this morning. The Roberts boy turned himself in for it first thing. Implicated a few other kids. All minors, so the parents are negotiating with Robin and Soraya – and their lawyer – now.”

“Huh.” Bran thought back to the boy in the bedroom, haunted by the belling of the hounds.

“All right,” Will said into the phone. “See you then. Bye.” He replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Everyone's down at the farm,” he told Bran. “Working on the cleanup, and dealing with the rest of the mess. Gwen said she was planning on heading over there when she's done with work. I figured we'd make our way there, ourselves. I thought you were going to go change clothes?”

“I was – I am. I saw that kid, when I was riding with the hunt.”

“Yes,” Will said, “and he saw you. You certainly get results, I'll say that for you! Do you have the right things packed for grubbing on the farm, or should I lend you a shirt and sweater?”

“I'll take you up on it, ta,” Bran admitted. “Packed for impressing boys in the city, not hunting and farming.”

“You're impressive no matter what you're wearing, but I'll spare your nice things, no worries.”

In addition to an old shirt and a warm sweater, a good cap and a pair of leather work gloves, Will provided him with a bicycle, one of several put up for the winter in a shed behind the kitchen entrance. After a few moments of fiddling with air pressure gauges, tyre pumps, and wrenches to adjust the seat height for Bran, they were off, cycling down the lane, the saddlebags on Will's bike filled with water bottles, apples, an umbrella, and an extra coat. “Talk about proper preparation!” Bran said, laughing.

“Prevents poor performance,” Will returned with a happy grin. Bundled up in a neon windbreaker, he looked young and carefree, quite different from the heavy-hearted old soldier he had appeared to Bran in the reading room. It was not, Bran thought, that one was the mask and one the man; rather, Will was both at once, an amphibious creature with a foot in either world. It was in the oscillation between them that Will's real character was to be found.

“I didn't bother to pack any tools,” Will added, “because I trust my father's got that handled. He taught me everything I know on that score, believe you me. I'm nothing in comparison to him.”

His words proved prophetic as they rode up to the farm. Roger Stanton was standing by the front gate, simultaneously directing several work crews: a garbage containment operation, a door repair team, and a re-painting crew. Alice was working by the farmhouse, arranging a plastic cover over the hole left by the front door's removal. Bran didn't recognize anyone else there; but almost a dozen people, including several teenagers and a number of adult men and women, were toiling to restore the farmyard to its previous state of neat order. 

“Hallo, you two,” Roger said as they dismounted. “Leave the bikes on the other side of the fence, I want to keep the gate clear for supplies. Have you heard the news?”

“Gwen said someone's kid confessed to it, right?” Bran asked, leaving Will to lock up the bikes.

“That's right,” Roger said, his compact body replete with satisfaction. “Young man had a change of heart after a bad night's sleep. Realized he wasn't quite the cold bastard his dad would have him be. I wish there had been some way to get at Perry Roberts, as well as his boy, but at least the son will get some decent counseling out of the mess, and maybe he'll get clear of that sort of nasty prejudice.”

“Heard he'd implicated some other boys, as well,” Will said, coming to join them.

“Ralph Mitchell and Jeremy Brown, yes. That's Mrs. Mitchell and Mr. Brown helping Alice with the door over there. Everyone's acting very upset about the whole thing. Whether they are or not is a matter to be debated, perhaps, but in the meantime I mean to secure every last bit of work and reparation for Robin and Soraya as I can.”

“If they've proved their contrition, does it matter if it was genuine?” Will wondered aloud.

“I think it does,” Bran said, “but your dad's right. Take them for what you can, so long as they're feeling bad about it, and use it to get clear – or get even.”

Will's father raised an eyebrow. “Implacable,” he observed.

“I don't like bullies,” Bran said flatly.

“Yes, I see,” Roger said, and Bran rather thought he did.

The tasks they were delegated were initially more supervisory than anything – “We've plenty of helping hands, between the guilty and the neighborly,” Roger told them, “but rather fewer of us to keep an eye on things.” Bran was set to ride herd on the teenagers gathering and sorting rubbish into piles to bag up for garbage, burn for a fire, keep for cleaning, and put into composting. Will began by supervising the repainting of the front walk and the whitewashing of the barn, but then abandoned those concerns to answer his mother's call for assistance, as the door crew undertook its re-hanging, struggling under the solid wooden weight.

They worked in the yard for several hours. Bran gave directions for the composter to be wheeled back to its place behind the barn, the garbage bags to be doubled, tied, and carted out to a waiting open-bed truck. Gwen came by to join in after a while, and Robin showed up in the late afternoon to stand by the gate with his father. He looked pale and tired, worn out with stress.

Heading over to them, Bran said, “I don't know where you want the burning pile, and I've got some things I thought you should look over, Robin. How are you holding up?”

“It's been a crazy day,” Robin said. “When they told us young Phil had confessed … I was so angry, and then I felt bad about being so angry at a kid, and then, when I was dealing with their parents, and the lawyers, I didn't know what to feel. All these apologies, when all we wanted was to be treated civilly from the start. Am I vindicated? I suppose I am.”

Bran said, “I get that. It's hard to know how you feel. When I was a kid, a local crank shot my dog, faked up a story that he'd been killing sheep. He had a breakdown a few days later, and everyone all of a sudden was trying to make it up to me – but all I wanted was my dog back. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this kind of shit.”

Roger clasped his son bracingly by the arms. “It'll be over soon,” he said. “We'll all pitch in and help you with this, and we'll get it over as soon as we can. You can move to London with your wonderful wife and your healthy baby and raise a happy family. Very soon.”

The front door of the farmhouse had been restored. Alice was checking the latch, pulling it open and shut, Will positioned inside to test the locks, and another woman was rolling up the tarps they'd used. Toolboxes were sitting about the front porch; they'd need to be put away, before the day's work was counted done.

“Are you lot about ready for something to eat?” Gwen asked, wandering over to the gate. “I've got those casseroles Mrs. Roberts brought this morning in the fridge at the bakery, I figured it would be easier to heat the big pans there and then bring them over to the house when people were ready.”

“Soraya's resting with the baby at mom and dad's right now,” Robin told her. “If you want to head that way, I'm sure she'd help you get set up.”

“We should be done here within the hour,” Roger said. “And then, you're right, Gwen, we should feed the masses. I'm sure everyone would appreciate it if you wanted to get a head-start on.”

“All right, then,” she said, and took off down the road.

“You boys planning on staying at the manor again tonight?” Roger asked Bran.

“I think so, yes,” Bran said. “And then I'll be off for Wales tomorrow morning first thing.”

“Come back for supper, anyway,” Roger said. “And you can use the phone at the house to call your father, let him know your plans. I don't know how Will's fixed for long-distance calling at Huntercombe. Will you need a ride to the station, tomorrow?”

“That would be super, if it's not an inconvenience,” Bran said. “Otherwise I'm sure I can work out the bus.”

“Nonsense,” Roger told him. “I'll be happy to take you, or Alice will.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bran said. “With all this trouble, it's good of you to think of it.”

“Not at all,” Roger said, watching as Will finished locking the farmhouse door for good, and then turned to help his mother lug the toolboxes back to the barn. “Not at all.”


	11. Chapter 11

The casseroles were sitting and steaming on trivets at the big table in the Stanton house when Will and Bran finally made their way to the door, having left their bicycles leaning up against the wall outside. A crowd had already assembled: Robin and his family, the elder Stantons, and Gwen and one of her co-workers, who'd helped with cooking and transport.

The smell of the hot food was delicious, and Bran was both hungry and tired. Still, though, he took the time to finally call home before he made to eat.

“Hi, da,” he said, more sheepish than he'd expected to be, now that he was come to it. “I suppose you've gathered that I won't be back tonight?”

He could practically hear the thinned lips that were his father's version of an eye roll. “Yes, well,” Owen said. “Since you had not called, I had not expected you.”

“Everything all right at the farm? Lambs not in yet, are they?”

“No, not yet,” came Owen's dry, precise voice down the line. “But it is a near thing, now. We are very lucky. Mr. Evans has hired on a new man, Emin, to help us this season, so there's no concern of being short-handed. He's a good fellow. Not over-talkative.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Bran said, taken aback that such changes were happening without him – foolishly, he knew. “I'll be on the train tomorrow, into station at Tywyn by 3 o'clock. Someone will be there to collect me?”

“Yes, yes,” his father said.

“All right. See you tomorrow, then. G'night, da.”

“Good night, Bran. Safe travels.” And then there was a click and dial tone, Owen Davies having hung up. After a moment, Bran hung up, too, and went to find his supper.

The table was full, both of food and of diners. The company was hungry enough that, for the first fifteen minutes, there wasn't much in the way of conversation. Then, as the first need for sustenance was met, little eddies of talk began.

“... door should hold up well,” Will was saying to his father. “They'd planed and patched it with epoxy, then sanded and re-finished. A nice repair to a good bit of lumber, that.”

“... don't think I could ever think of going back,” Soraya was telling Gwen. “Everything feels different, now. I don't think I'll ever feel quite safe here, not ever again.”

Cutting in to Soraya and Gwen's conversation, Roger offered, “You should talk to the law office about it, of course, but sometimes the best thing to do is to use your resources when you need to. Let's get you up and settled somewhere you do feel safe, as soon as possible.”

“I think that's a good plan,” Soraya admitted, “but it's hard to see it happening soon enough. There's just so much.”

“You have all of our help, and the payments from the families. We'll muddle through. Don't worry too much tonight, the shock is still very fresh. The most important thing for you now is to rest, and not spend too much time feeling afraid.”

“I feel safe here, in your home,” Soraya said miserably, “but – nowhere else, not after this. Not in this village.”

“When you're settled in London,” Will put in gently, “it might help to talk to someone. You know, a doctor. About how you're feeling.”

Soraya drew in a deep breath, looked at him, shook herself, squared her shoulders. “Yes, that sounds good,” she said. “I have a friend who should be able to give me a good recommendation. When we're settled in London.” Will smiled at her, dedicated, serious, impossibly beautiful in his unrelenting decency.

Bran was hit with the intensity of his feelings all at a moment, like a piece of lumber to the head.

They headed off for the manor after dinner, another parcel of food – “For the morning, and in case you want a snack later,” Alice said – stowed in Will's saddlebags. The night air chilled Bran's skin as he cycled at Will's side along Huntercombe Lane, awkwardly holding an electric torch in one hand that cast its wavering beams of illumination to and fro across the road in front of them, more in the idea that they could be seen by any passing traffic than in hope of being guided on their way.

“I have an idea for when we get back,” Will said softly; he had been quiet since they'd left his parents', but restfully so, leaving Bran feeling secure and tranquil, not anxious or worried.

“Will I like it?”

“I think so.”

They left the bikes locked to the outer railing, Bran stealing a kiss from Will as he fixed the lock, and walked up to the manor house hand in hand.

After Will opened the great door and turned on the hall lights, and they had removed their shoes and jackets, he slid to one knee in the hallway and said, a little breathlessly, “My lord Pendragon, if it will please you this night to take your ease in the master bedroom of my hall, it would be a compliment to my honor.” He was blushing, redness staining his cheeks and running down under his shirt collar.

Bran smiled. “All right,” he said. “I definitely wouldn't say no to a bigger bed.” He did not say, the better to have you in, but he figured it was implied. “You'll have to lead the way; I've never actually slept upstairs, here.”

“Certainly, sire,” Will said. “Let me show you up, and then you can get settled while I fetch a bottle for us. I keep a good wine cellar here, for events and guests and things. I promise I won't get you too drunk, I know you have to travel in the morning, but after the day we've had, you deserve something to relax with.”

“Twist my arm harder, _dewin_ ,” Bran drawled, and made studious observance of Will's very nice bottom as it proceeded up the stairs in front of him.

When Will opened up the master bedroom, Bran understood the blushing. The large bed was opulently draped with tapestried hangings. Like the walls of the ballroom downstairs, the wall behind the head of the bed was painted in dreamlike and dramatic scenes, plants and animals framing the luxurious furniture. A great gold-framed oil painting of a leaping white hart hung over a screened fireplace. The room was almost monarchical in its splendor.

“Damn,” Bran said, as Will turned up the electric lights in the crystal chandelier and wall sconces, “you don't do things by halves, do you?”

“This was the room that was reserved for visiting royalty, when the house was built,” Will said. “I only restored it to the original – as my dad likes to say – barbaric splendor of the period.”

That elicited a bark of laughter. “What a revolutionary your father is!”

“Now, I rent it out to anyone who'll pay for a holiday package,” Will said. “So that's some kind of reclamation. It's a good money-maker; you'd be surprised how many people are interested in that sort of thing. The bathroom is through that door –” indicating a section of the wall with a peacock's tail fanning around it in a sweeping arc. “I'll be right back with the wine. Red all right? I don't have anything chilled for a white.”

“Fine, fine,” Bran said with a lazy wave. “Put me right to sleep, that will.”

He took the opportunity to wash up after the long day, and when he came back out, Will had returned already, and two glasses of red wine were sitting on the mantelpiece to breathe. Will was bent down by the fireplace, fanning a small flame until it caught properly on the kindling and began to emit a pleasant light and heat.

Finished with the fire, Will stood and reached for him, then, a solemn expression in his deep blue eyes. He handed Bran down to sit on the edge of an elegant velvet sofa by the fireplace, and then gave him one of the glasses of wine. Lifting the other in a toast, he took a sip, savored it, and slowly swallowed. The light was warm and golden on the open planes of his face.

Unbuttoning first his own shirt, then Bran's, Will knelt down to remove Bran's socks before reaching up to unfasten his fly. Moving with deliberate intensity, not saying a word but still looking up at him intermittently with those great serious eyes, Will kissed Bran's skin as it was revealed from under his clothes, not just his check and neck but his elbows and knees, his navel, his wrists.

Greedily, Bran pushed Will's open shirt off his shoulders, and pulled him up onto the divan beside him to have a go at his trousers in turn. Will's touching of his wrists had made him aware, and he looked at Will's own inner forearms once Will's torso was bared, there where the scar of the Light had been branded in. Bran wrapped his hand around and over the scar, covering it completely. He turned his hand until he was pinning Will to the sofa by the wrist, holding him close, caught for good and all. Will didn't struggle in his grasp, only turned his face up to kiss Bran's mouth.

When Bran relinquished him, at length, Will stood, shedding the last remnants of his clothes as he moved. Naked in the firelight, he refilled the two glasses of half-drunk wine, almost emptying the bottle, and came back to sit almost in Bran's lap.

“Now,” he said, “finish your cup, my lord, and come to bed. Here, I'll help you.” And he guided the glass in Bran's hand to his own mouth, bringing the wine that he held close to Bran's lips. Slowly, breathing carefully so as not to choke, Bran drank from the offered cup, and let Will drink from his; and he could feel Will concentrating, likewise, breathing in synchrony and swallowing the tannic wine.

“Good,” Will said, when both were empty. “I'm glad my offering pleases you.”

Bran had to laugh a little then, the wine going to his head and chasing away any sensation of chill or reserve. “You please me,” he said. “I think, if you are only honest with me, you always will. Even when I do not agree with you – for you to please yourself, pleases me.”

“That's … that's very good,” Will said. “Can I fuck you tonight? I'll make it good for you, I promise. It felt so amazing, when you were inside of me. Let me give you that. Lie back on the bed and let me show you how much I want you, how much you mean to me.”

It was Bran's turn to be blushing, he could feel it. Will was so disarmingly earnest, romantic and fervid, glowing like an ember. “Of course. I mean. Yes. Of course.”

Will unlinked his arm from Bran's and stood, putting down the empty glass still held dangling in one hand. He went to the bed, turned back the coverlet, revealed the dark green expanse of the fine linens beneath. Will's hands were cool and steady on Bran's shoulders, supporting and guiding him, and then the bed beneath him was very soft.

He closed his eyes, taking in all the sensations of the moment: soft sheet, crackling fire, radiant warmth, dryness of wine in the mouth, and, as Will climbed onto the bed above him, the scent of his lover, musky and delightful in his nostrils. Will positioned them with Bran's legs straddling his own hips, bending Bran's kneends to tilt his hips up, and then let their two cocks press together between their bodies as he leaned down to kiss Bran's mouth, face, chest, nipples.

“I wish I could stay here with you forever,” Bran said, unguardedly, into Will's shoulder, almost taking himself by surprise.

Will sat back and looked at him with one of those terribly sweet sad smiles of his. “I know, he said. “I love you.”

He retrieved a bottle of lube that he must have placed earlier, when he was making the bed ready, and generously smoothed a dollop onto his flushed and swollen cock. The tapering, heavily-lubricated tip pressed gently against Bran's hole, encouraging and insistent, and slowly, slowly spread him until he'd taken the entire length inside. Only then did Will start to thrust, rocking them hard and deep, his cock hammering again and again against Bran's prostate, right on target every time. Then Will reached down to wrap one of his hands firmly around Bran's shaft as they fucked, and Bran almost yelled with how much he wanted to come, with how much he wanted Will to come, with how much he wanted the connection between them never to end. Will matched his moans, no need to be quiet here, voicing the intensity and passion of their love-making.

Climax came at last to each of them almost simultaneously, by then so synchronized in body that they were breathing in time. Their two hearts must be beating in time, Bran thought as he came back to earth, concentrating on the feeling of Will's pulse, apparent to him in the places where Will's body was draped heavily over his own.

“I love you, too,” he said hoarsely, and shifted his hips out of the wet spot he'd left on the sheets.

He had almost fallen asleep when something about the flickering light reminded him. Will, still lying half on top of him, was drowsing likewise, and Bran tried to stir enough to wake him. “The fire,” he said. “Needs to be put out.”

“All right,” Will muttered. Not even opening his eyes, he reached out his right hand, stiff-fingered, toward the hearth, and at his gesture of command the fire died.

He'd said he could do that earlier, hadn't he? Bran was too tired to properly process it. Was it terrifying, that Will could make and control fires with his mind? Yes, a little. But the potential fire hazard had been dealt with, Will was nestling down comfortably in his arms, and it wasn't worth the fight to stay awake and nail him down for any more answers that night.

Will was what he was; and Bran was also learning that he was in truth a great deal more powerful than he had known. He had been victorious in a hunt to secure justice and reparation, and that knowledge was an anchor to keep his heart at rest in a sense of strength and safety as he drifted off to sleep in his strange new long-known lover's warm embrace.

Alice Stanton came to pick them up early in the grey and windy morning the next day, baby Lainey strapped in a car seat in the back. Will, assigned to watch the baby for the day while her parents dealt with various types of unpleasantness and wrangling, was left behind at the Stantons' house. He and Bran said their goodbyes briefly, without many words, only a soft kiss to seal an unspoken promise. Will stood in the doorway with Lainey on his hip, holding up her hand so that they could both wave farewell, as the car pulled away up the drive and turned out into the lane.

“Can I ask you a question, Bran?” Alice said, as they left the little village behind, merging into the flow of commuter traffic on the highway.

Bran thought of the various personal and metaphysical secrets of which he was currently in possession. “You can ask,” he said cautiously. “I make no promises, but I can try to answer.”

“Fair enough – and no worries. I've been thinking about the farm, you see. Dawsons' farm. Do you think it could be successfully run as a real farm again, with the land and the outbuildings as they are?”

That was none of the questions he'd been expecting, and it took him a moment to re-route his thinking to practical matters. “Well,” he said at length, “It would depend on what you wanted to get out of it. Not nearly enough land for a commercial operation, not for sheep or pigs, and not nearly enough land to grow a full crop. As a small-scale sustainable system, now, that would do just fine. Say, one that specializes in organic, or maybe even halal, growing and harvesting conditions. From what I saw yesterday, everything there is in close to good working order.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “About the scale, and the specialization.”

“Why? Thinking of taking up farming in earnest?”

“Oh, not at my age,” she laughed. “Thirty years and five babies ago, maybe. No, farming is a young man's occupation. I'll leave you to it. I remember what lambing was like, from when I was a girl.”

They drove on in silence for a few minutes, and then she added, “You and Will do seem like you're getting on well together. Not that I've any intention to pry, but I want you to know I'm happy for you both.”

“Thank you,” Bran said. “I'm – we agreed on it, that we're dating. I told him I'm in love with him.”

“Did he tell you that he loves you back?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said briskly. “Communication is the backbone of any relationship. Mind you always keep your lines of communication open, young man. I've been married for a long time, so you can consider me something of an expert in the topic.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, flashing her a grin.

 

Emin, the new man who'd been hired on at the Evans farm, was the one who picked Bran up from the station in the afternoon when his train got in. With dark, curly hair and a wide, gap-toothed smile, he looked to be about Bran's age, give or take half a decade. He was from Chechnya, and spoke in heavily-accented English. He didn't react at all to Bran's appearance when he saw him, and so Bran decided that he was all right.

Emin was driving David Evans' Land Rover. “Mr. Evans is very kind to work for,” he said, as the Land Rover jounced over the mountain road home. “Trusts me with interesting jobs – like picking up a friend from the train station in town.”

“Yeah,” Bran said. “They're great, the lot of them. If you can stand the isolation, it's a good living.”

“And what about you?” Emin asked, giving him a sidelong glance. “Can you stand it?” As the Land Rover climbed, the world grew green and steep and stony around them. It was beautiful, this place of his narrow Welsh valleys framed by the towering mountain peaks, but Bran's wayward heart tugged him back to green and rolling England, and the river valley of the Thames.

“I used to do fine,” he said. “Now … I'm wondering if I've lost the trick.”

The work of the springtime farm swept Bran up in its whirlwind embrace as soon as he touched back down; and for a time, it was hard to think of what had passed between him and Will, with the rush and urgency of the lambing. It was four days gone when Bran received his first new letter.

“Dear Bran,

We are all well, here, and quite busy. I miss you terribly – I wasn't sure if I was going to put that in this letter at all, but there it is, right at the top, and there I suppose it shall have to stay.

I have been keeping busy, doing a once-over on the grounds at Huntercombe, ordering supplies for my spring plantings in the gardens. I've been sleeping there at night, too. I think, after we did together, mum got used to the idea again that it was all right for me to be in my own home. And, of course, Robin and Soraya are still staying with them, so there's not much resistance to getting me out of the way for the present.

Robin and Soraya have worked out the last of the details of their settlement with the vandals' families, and it's a substantial sum, enough that they're prepared to take their losses and run in terms of selling the farm. I am glad for them, although I shall miss them very much.

I hope you are well and happy, and that Uncle David's farm hasn't fallen into wrack and ruin without you. Write me back soon? I find that separation after closeness is uniquely distressing, so different from pining for that which you never hope to have …

Love, always,  
Will”

It was hours before Bran had the time to write him back; his next free period of time came in the middle of the night, in the animal-scented chill of the springtime barn, as he sat in the straw beside Emin waiting for one of the sheep to finish a lengthy labor. Much longer, and they would give her medicine to bring the birth on, but it was better to wait for nature, if they could. Glancing over at Emin, who seemed disinclined to bother him, he pulled out Will's letter, a notebook, and a ballpoint pen, and began to write.

“Dear Will,

Lambing's in full swing – I'm waiting on a ewe now – but I think of you whenever I have a moment to spare. Miss you as well. Glad to hear the others are all doing okay; Robin and Soraya are right to get out while the getting's good.

Keep yourself well, wizard. I will think of you in your bed at Huntercombe.

My love,  
Bran”

Perhaps not the most eloquent of love-letters, but if Will didn't know yet where Bran could be relied on for excellence and where he could not be, he was going to have to get used to some disappointments.

A week later, Bran stopped into the post office at Tywyn to pick up a package for Mr. Evans, and asked after the mail for the cottages, as well; he could get the post a day earlier, if no one had to drive it up the mountain.

The postmistress grinned at him. “Two letters for you today, Bran bach,” she said, “and both postmarked from Buckinghamshire. One from a man and one a woman, to judge by the names. What are you about, flirting with one of your English friends’ sisters on the sly?”

Bran felt himself flushing, and stammered, “No, no, nothing like that. Here, give me my post, then.” He waited to open the letters – one from Will, one from Alice Stanton – until he was safely out of sight up the valley road.

Curious, he tore open the fat envelope from Mrs. Stanton first.

“Dear Bran,

I hope you are well, and your family. We are all quite well, and I am very much occupied in some hasty, if thorough, planning, which if you are interested can expand to include yourself.

I am going to buy the old Dawson farm from Robin and Soraya. I have some money of my own saved up, and they're making me a deal in light of the settlement money they're receiving. They want to be clear of the property, and aren't in immediate need of the full payment, so that works out neatly.

My plan is to re-establish the property as a working farm. I'm flexible on the details. Will has been bending my ear about grants available for heritage practices and historical restoration, and certainly that's an option.

While I'm interested in being involved with the day-to-day running of the place, as a sort of retirement project – I should like to get the rhythm of farming work back in my life – I don't want to be the manager of the thing. I propose to hire someone else to do it. Do you want the job? You could have a lot of discretion in the setup et cetera, if you got in on the ground.

I am enclosing the various plans for the farm that I've drawn up, as well as a proposed 5-year contract for you as farm manager to look over. Please do know that, while obviously your relationship with Will may a factor in your life-choices, this position is in no way contingent on your involvement with him – and, if you ever need to leave, I intend to treat you fairly, making sure your professional career doesn't sustain any collateral damage. Note the vacation allotments in the contract, so that you could visit Wales and your family there.

I think we could work well together, you and I. Do let me know your honest thoughts – if any particulars need to be adjusted, I've confidence we can negotiate.

I know it is only the silly plan of an old woman, but there it is. If I’ve run mad, will you kindly let me know?

Roger's made Soraya a beautiful set of etched nameplates for her new office, from designs that Max drew up for us on the sly. Will’s lungs continue to improve, as per his medical check-up a few days ago, and the doctor certified his health as stable. He’s been quiet, but he smiles sometimes, so I’m not _too_ worried, at least for now. He seems happy to receive your letters.

With gratitude,

Alice Stanton”

His mind in a whirl, new options opening up like unexpected pocket dimensions around him, Bran opened the other letter, the one from Will. Had Alice told him that she was offering Bran a job? Not from the opening lines, she didn't seem to have done.

“Dear Bran,

I went back to the Dawsons' farm today, helping Robin pack for the move, and while he was occupied I revisited my work on the front door. I've been thinking a lot about what you said, about using what I know for good, and I do think I can do more, or at least try to, even though the world is so changed from the one of our boyhood. Doors and thresholds are important transitional spaces, worth taking care with and protecting. I would not see the farm defaced again, not if there's anything I can do about it.

I've also been looking into the law – there's been a lot of lawyering about, what with Robin and Soraya's situation. I think I might be able to do something with the Huntercombe trust. It's still just an idea, but – like Miss Greythorne, as I told you, the Dawsons were part of my circle, and I should like to do something to preserve their legacy.

I ought to thank you, for waking me back up to my life, only – I don't want you to feel pressured by how much I have needed you.

I find myself envying the new lambs, who get to enjoy the comfort and care of your touch. I hope you are not too cold, up there in the mountains late at night. If you can, make a fire, and think of me.

Yours,  
Will”

He sat in stillness for a moment on one of the great stones that lined the road, with the sad, sweet love letter held tight in his hand, and briefly closed his eyes.

Then, setting it aside, Bran had a look at Alice Stanton's offer. It was substantial, the kind of position that would set him up nicely, a potential launch for any number of good opportunities. Thoughts racing, he recalled to mind the Dawsons' farm – could he do it? Would it just become a money pit, or was there a solid project in it? He thought he agreed with Alice that there was, but he was going to have to be careful and considered in his approach. He wanted a future with Will; he didn't want to risk it by jumping too soon.

He brought it up with his father and John Rowlands at supper that night.

His father said, with a calm acceptance that rather startled Bran, “Yes, I thought you might be thinking about moving on. That was one of the reasons why I suggested David Evans hire Emin Varayev, in addition to his being a good and capable young man who does a very good job. Give me those papers.”

As Owen set to reviewing them, John asked Bran, with a serious look, “Do you think you could be happy there? You would be far from home.” His voice sounded very Welsh to Bran's ears then, deep and sonorous, a sound from Celtic antiquity; and he was right, that it was not how the voices sounded in Huntercombe. But –

“Yes,” he said, “I think I could. I think it might be worth a shot, at least. If I don't like it I can come back, or go on to something else.”

“True enough,” Owen put in. “Mrs. Stanton's contract seems very equitable in that regard. I should advise you to get a few more opinions, however. Talk to Mr. Evans about it, and perhaps a lawyer. It is your future we are talking about here.”

“That's a good idea, to talk to Mr. Evans,” Bran said. “I wonder if Mrs. Stanton shouldn't consult with him directly, about her ideas for the farm.

“Be careful with your heart, Bran,” John warned him. “It is a good heart, but impulsive and passionate. Don't let it lead you for a fool.”

Catching and holding John's eyes across the supper table, Bran said, “I understand, John. Really I do. Still, what are we living for, if not to try for the impulses of our hearts? If I get burned, I get burned. Perhaps I'll find I'm able to fly, instead. Either way, it won't be the end of the world.”

“No,” John said, “But you can only make each choice once over; and, once chosen, your choices are always with you, for good or ill.”

“For good or ill, then,” Bran said, toasting him with his water glass. “I'll take the papers over to Mr. Evans when I talk to him about the stock numbers tomorrow.”

Mr. Evans had lots of ideas, it turned out. “Alice didn't tell me anything about this,” he said. “I wonder if she's spoke to Jen on the matter? If so, Jen's not said. Well, Alice is not mad, not at all, to suggest it. It could absolutely be made to work, especially if you set it up from the beginning as a niche enterprise of one sort or another. It would be a very good job for you, I should say, my lad. You'll be able to grow into it, and it to you. Size up the land and the local economic conditions and determine what will be best to do with it. Excellent good flexibility, that.”

“And – you think I can do it, sir? I wouldn't make a hash of it?”

“Not at all. You're a very capable young man, Bran, and Alice will have your back. She's a steady sort, not prone to silliness or waste. And you've got a good friend there in her boy Will, don't you? I remember you being close as children, for a few seasons.”

“Yes,” Bran said, “a very good friend. Thank you for the advice, sir, I very much appreciate it.” He had worked for Mr. Evans since he'd been a boy, and respected his judgement. If David Evans said he could pull the thing off, he likely wasn't wrong.

“Do you think Emin would do well here, if I kept him on after the lambing?” Mr. Evans asked him.

“Yes, very well. He's a useful person all together. I give you my firm recommendation of him, Mr. Evans.”

Bran didn't bother, after that, with consulting a lawyer. David Evans' word was good enough, and only underlined Bran's own judgement of the case: that it would be a good turn in his path to take this chance, and make a try for great happiness instead of lingering still in the peace and familiarity of his home. He'd stayed for a long time, almost three decades, and he would come back again, but for now, it was time to go.

He wrote Mrs. Stanton the next morning, giving her his initial acceptance, with a few caveats and changes to the proposed contract. Then, he put the letter away unsent, and wrote another one to her son.

“Dear Will,

Just a short note this time, but a big question, and a decision you should have some input on. Your mother's offered me a job running the Dawson farm in Huntercombe. You said you wanted it preserved as a tribute to your friends who are gone, and I think I can do it. If I came, would I be an imposition on you, or your life, or your family? I think I know your answer, but wanted to check all the same. If you need more time to be sure, I can wait, and perhaps I could even talk your mother into postponing things for a few months.

I could see you every day, if I lived in Buckinghamshire. I would be able to fulfill my vow. The job is for five years; if you wanted, after that, we could leave, we could go anywhere together, or we could stay in Huntercombe together, whatever you want. And I could live in the farmhouse at first, so you wouldn't have to put up with me too much too soon.

I'm sure you can tell which way my heart is leading me, but I wanted to give you first response,  
Bran”

Once that letter was sent, he had only to wait. In the end, the grateful reply to Mrs. Stanton went out just a week later.

“Off you go to England,” Jen Evans said to him with a watery smile, when she heard he was leaving them in the summer. “You're the reverse of me, aren't you? Sometimes your heart puts down roots in surprising places. But I think you'll flourish, Bran, now and always.”

 

When Bran Davies made the journey once more from the coast of Wales to the Thames River Valley, in a full-moon night in the middle of June, possessed of full cognizance of the relation he bore to the land of the Isle of Britain, by blood still the heir of its most rightful king, he saw again the network of humming lines of bright power that he had become aware of from time to time; and now he understood, as he rode the rails up beyond the Welsh mountains, through the West Midlands, and into the Chilterns, that the lines ran parallel to, or intersected with, a myriad other and more ancient ways, so that wherever one went, there always was the thrumming current of the land's power.

I am returned, Hunstman, he thought, as the train moved across the boundary line of the Ancient Way. For a little while.

He thought that he might have heard the pleased baying of a hound, and smiled.

Will was there waiting for him when he got off the train, smiling in the summer sun, still in long sleeves that hid his wrists, and Bran grabbed him close, dragged him over to a private corner of the car park by the station, and proceeded to despoil his boyfriend's mouth as thoroughly as possible.

At the three crossings of the Thames between the railway station and Huntercombe village, Bran felt and acknowledged the presence of the river; and that presence was a current, strong and deep and dark as night, but he stood rooted against it, like a hemlock tree with its gnarled net of roots dipping down into water, drawing on it and not drowning.

They drove straight to the farm; Will said it was “ready and waiting.” There was a great deal more to do before it would be “ready” in any professional capacity; but Robin and Soraya's things had all been packed up, except for the basic furnishings, and many of Bran's already shipped across to fill the empty space, so that there would be a home for him as a wrestled with the details.

There had been a lot of moving, in the last six weeks. When Mr. Evans had asked Emin Varayev to stay on, the young man had agreed on the terms that he could bring his wife and six-year-old son from eastern Europe to live with him in Wales. When John Rowlands had offered to shift into Owen Davies' cottage, now that Bran was gone – so that they wouldn't be too lonely, either one, so he said – it had opened up the other for Emin and his family. The new arrivals were scheduled to show up in a week or two, and John for one seemed excited to have a child coming to live on the farm again, that he could play with and mentor and tell stories.

Will opened the boot of the car, borrowed from the senior Stantons for the evening, and set to work lugging Bran's bags up to the front door. As Bran set down his own load while Will unlocked it, Will said, “I wrote to you that I'd been working on protections. Here, see what I've been doing?” He pointed to a mark incised on the inner edge of the door, like a six-pointed star. “A bindrune,” Will explained. “And I washed the threshold with salt and oil. And I did the same at the barn doors, and at the front gate.”

“Good work,” Bran said, looking happily around the green space of the farmyard.

“There's a lot more I can do,” Will said. “Especially now that you're here.”

“We'll both be busy, then,” Bran said with a laugh, “for I was just thinking, looking at the land, of how neatly my first tasks were laid out here for me to start in on.”

“I still think you should try to do something preservationist,” Will chatted, grabbing bags and boxes to begin stacking them on the interior stairs. “I can partner the Huntercombe Manor trust with you, no problem. I've looked it up; all I'd have to do is get a sign-off from Stephen. You could apply for a grant from the NMHF, even.”

“That's a good idea, really,” Bran admitted. “It's either that or organics. Maybe both. It will depend mostly on how the details shake out; your Uncle David told me not to set my plans in stone too far out, because I might need to be flexible from season to season. We won't plant much until next spring, so there's plenty of time to make our game plan, and get the ground ready, and anything else we'll need.”

As he followed Will into the farmhouse, Bran felt his travel-weariness being temporarily banished by the pure excitement of the homecoming. Likely it would hit him again it later, especially if Will had brought a celebratory bottle. “Are we seeing any of the rest of your tribe tonight?”

“No,” Will said, “you and mother can get down to business tomorrow, but for this first night, I'm claiming you all to myself. I told her so.”

“You naughty thing, you,” Bran said with a laugh.

“I should put dinner in the oven – Gwen's sent over a roast chicken and potatoes, just needs heating up.”

The interior of the farmhouse was plain and clean, a bit under-furnished, with just the basics in place. The bedrooms were all in the second storey, above the large kitchen, dining room, parlor, and study cum office; two smaller rooms, and a large master bedroom with south-eastern and southerly exposure and a forest view. Some of Bran's clothes had been hung up in the closet, and boxes of his books, journals, and personal effects were stacked in a corner. The bed, an iron-framed queen, was covered with a wedding-ring quilt of bright calico fabrics on a cream backing The windows were open, and an electric fan positioned in one sent a breeze rippling through the high-ceilinged room; it had been hot that day, and was still quite warm even as the hour grew late.

Coming upstairs from the kitchen, Will slid his arms around Bran's waist from behind him. “Does everything look all right?”

“Great,” Bran answered. “Will you stay, tonight?”

“Of course. Only, I didn't want to presume.”

“It's good we'll have our own spaces, for a while – but of course I want you with me tonight. I'm here for you, _dewin,_ and we both know it. And that's right where you want me. Don't play coy with me, love, or I'll have to put you over my knee and wring some true confessions from those pretty lips.”

“Is that a promise?” Will husked against Bran's ear, and Bran turned to kiss him, and then bore him down to the bed.

“Only ask me, and it will be,” he said.

Tomorrow, he would meet with Mrs. Stanton, and, if he could find her, the genius Tamesis, to let her know that he had returned to begin his payment of time owed in exchange for Will's freedom on the earth. For now, he was going to steal kisses from Will for as long as he was able, then eat chicken and potatoes and drink wine, and finally fall asleep in his new bed with his beloved there beside him where he properly belonged.

Later that night, as the sun set on the two bodies intertwined in the bed, Bran heard again the sounds of hounds baying, and the eerie call of Herne's hunting-horn voice ringing out over the land in welcome.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we've landed! But there's probably going to be a good bit more to this 'verse before it's done; I'm drafting the next story, tentatively titled "Watch the green field growing for reaping folk and sowing," and have notes for a few after that. I've got a lot of momentum on this project as a whole right now, and may be able to get the next part out relatively quickly - though I also historically vibrate between fandoms, and might end up switching gears to other projects unexpectedly, fair warning given. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting while this story has been in progress - you're the reason for the season, the drive in my engine, the cream in my coffee and the knees of my bees :)


End file.
